On Sat, May 24, 2025, at 19:37, Daniel Kesselberg wrote: > Hi everyone, > > I'm happy to share my first RFC :) It proposes adding a small function > to retrieve the number of available processors; a feature that's > commonly found in other programming languages and one that I believe > would be a useful addition to PHP. > > The related PR has already received a bit of early traction, and now > that the RFC is complete, I'm looking forward to your feedback! > > RFC: https://wiki.php.net/RFC/num_available_processors > Patch: https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/11137 > > Best > Daniel >
Looks good! My main question is: what is this actually counting? In the RFC it mentions "available processing units" ... which means, what? What counts as a "processing unit"? Are we talking about CPU Threads/cores; NPU cores; TPM cores; clocks? GPS? GPU? ... a modern computer has many "processing units" for different purposes and workloads. I’m assuming this is CPU Threads, not physical cores? I will refer to CPU Threads as "Logical Cores" so we all don’t get confused since most of us here are programmers and saying "thread" has a different meaning. Secondly, how is it counting "available"? If I assign PHP to a specific CPU affinity mask (say one logical core), will it return 1, or the total number of logical cores available on my machine? I would expect it to be 1, since PHP only has access to 1, but I can also see the logic in returning the total number. — Rob
