On 2005-05-27, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>> How can I make sure that a Python process does not use more that 30% of >>> the CPU at any time. I only want that the process never uses more, but >>> I don't want the process being killed when it reaches the limit (like >>> it can be done with resource module).
>> Are you looping during a cpu intensive task? If so, make it sleep a bit >> like this: >> >> for x in cpu_task: >> time.sleep(0.5) >> do(x) > > or like this (untested!) > > finished = False > while not finished: > before = time.time() > do(x) # sets finished if all was computed > after = time.time() > delta = after-before > time.sleep(delta*10/3.) > > now the trick: do(x) can be a single piece of code, with > strategically placed yield's all over.... Since you have no way of knowing that your process was the only one running between the two calls to time.time(), you're placing an upper bound on how much CPU time you're using, but the actual usage is unknown and may be much lower on a heavily loaded machine. Running for 100ms and sleeping for 333ms results in an upper limit of 25% rather than 30%. Sleeping for (delta * 7.0/3.0) gives a 30% upper bound. All that aside, it seems to me that this situation is analogous to when people waste all sorts of effort trying to write clever applications that cache parts of files or other data structures in main memory with backing store on disk. They end up with a big, complicated, buggy app that's slower and requires more resources than a far simpler app that lets the OS worry about memory management. IOW, you're probably better off not trying to write application code that tries to out-think your OS. Use whatever prioritizing scheme your OS kernel provides for setting up a low priority "background" task, and let _it_ worry about divvying up the CPU. That's what it's there for, and it's got a far better picture of resource availability and demand. -- Grant Edwards grante Yow! Yow! It's a hole at all the way to downtown visi.com Burbank! -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list