[Python-ideas] Add os.usable_cpu_count()

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Mon, Sep 4, 2017 at 8:59 PM, Giampaolo Rodola' <g.rodola at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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)).

This was discussed in https://bugs.python.org/issue23530

It looks like the resolution at that time was:

- os.cpu_count() should *not* report the number of CPUs accessible to
the current process, but rather continue to report the number of CPUs
that exist in the system (whatever that means in these days of
virtualization... e.g. if you use KVM to set up a virtual machine with
limited CPUs, then that changes os.cpu_count, but if you do it with
docker then that doesn't).

- multiprocessing and similar should continue to treat os.cpu_count()
as if it returned the number of CPUs accessible to the current
process.

Possibly some lines got crossed there...

-n

-- 
Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org