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psutil vs os.cpu_count – How many “CPUs” do I have?

The goal

How man “CPUs” do I have in this computer? We need this information for multi-processing.

Questions to David Rotermund

os.cpu_count

We get the core count inclusive the virtual hyper threading cores. But it is included in Python:

import os
# If -1 then it looks up the amount of available CPU HT cores
number_of_cpu_processes: int = -1
number_of_cpu_processes_temp = os.cpu_count()

if number_of_cpu_processes < 1:
    if number_of_cpu_processes_temp is None:
        number_of_cpu_processes = 1
    else:
        number_of_cpu_processes = number_of_cpu_processes_temp

print(number_of_cpu_processes) #-> 12 (for my computer)

Alternative psutil

pip install psutil

psutil: “Cross-platform lib for process and system monitoring in Python”

I can deliver us more than just the CPU count:

  • CPU
  • Memory
  • Disks
  • Network
  • Sensors
  • Other system info
  • Process management
  • Further process APIs
  • Windows services
import psutil

number_of_cpu_processes: int = -1
number_of_cpu_processes_no_ht: int = -1
if number_of_cpu_processes == -1:
    number_of_cpu_processes = psutil.cpu_count()
    number_of_cpu_processes_no_ht = psutil.cpu_count(logical=False)

print(number_of_cpu_processes) # -> 12 (for my computer)

print(number_of_cpu_processes_no_ht) # -> 6 (for my computer)

The source code is Open Source and can be found on GitHub.