testng: @BeforeClass not executed in parallel when parallel="instances"

I personally came across the source of my problem when I found this stack overflow thread which helped me make sense of some strange behavior I’ve been encountering with a Factory + DataProvider + Parallel Instances

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/30027872/beforeclass-in-testng-is-not-executed-in-parallel-with-parallel-instances

It doesn’t look like a bug was ever filed, but I am getting burned with my selenium tests queueing against the grid, and waiting for a browser in the @BeforeClass annotation which sets up my test in a parent class. The child class has a @Factory to create all the instances up front, and the @Test method to actually carry out the test. The problem is that once a browser hits the grid queue, no other tests will start up, even though there are plenty of instances available (we test against various browsers, so having 1 browser flavor queue up doesn’t mean that the grid is completely busy).

The example posted in the stack overflow thread is:

@BeforeClass
public void beforeClass() throws InterruptedException{
    System.out.println("In Before Class ::: " + Thread.currentThread().getId());
    Thread.sleep(2000);
}


@Test
public void test(){
    System.out.println("In Test ::: " + Thread.currentThread().getId());
}

@AfterClass
public void afterClass(){
    System.out.println("In After Class ::: " + Thread.currentThread().getId());
}

I am running 6.9.9.