This is a follow up of a feature request which recently appeared on psutil bug tracker: https://code.google.com/p/psutil/issues/detail?id=427 I don't know whether the proposal makes sense for psutil per-se but it certainly made me think about multiprocessing.cpu_count() and the fact that it currently returns the number of virtual CPUs (physical + logical). Given that multiple processes cannot take any advantage of hyper threading technology then maybe it makes sense for multiprocessing to expose a physical_cpu_count() function in order to preemptively figure out how many processes to spawn. Same thing is discussed here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/nzpug/_5sFW9BEMQ4/Y4laXRNlXkMJ Thoughts? --- Giampaolo https://code.google.com/p/pyftpdlib/ https://code.google.com/p/psutil/ https://code.google.com/p/pysendfile/