Recently os.cpu_count() on Windows has been fixed in order to take process groups into account and return the number of all available CPUs: http://bugs.python.org/issue30581 This made me realize that os.cpu_count() does not return the number of *usable* CPUs, which could possibly represent a better default value for things like multiprocessing and process pools. It is currently possible to retrieve this info on UNIX with len(os.sched_getaffinity(0)) which takes CPU affinity and (I think) Linux cgroups into account, but it's not possible to do the same on Windows which provides this value via GetActiveProcessorCount() API. As such I am planning to implement this in psutil but would like to know how python-ideas feels about adding a new os.usable_cpu_count() function (or having os.cpu_count(usable=True)). Thoughts? -- Giampaolo - http://grodola.blogspot.com