J wrote:
Ok... that all helped a lot. I've been playing around with memory a bit, and cache, and I'll poke at that some more later. Today I've been looking into processors.So WMI provides Win32_Processor and from what I've read, there exists one instance of Win32_Processor for each processor on a SMP machine. So for starters, I assume then that if I had one such machine, I could count all the cores simply by doing something like: for p in c.Win32_Processor : procCount = procCount + 1 which makes sense.
Ummm. Not quite. c.Win32_Processor is a class-ish thing which you have to call to pull back the *list* of instances. Which you can then just count. So something like this: n_processors = len (c.Win32_Processor ()) I can't at this moment remember how the c.Win32_Processor interacts with physical processors, multicore processors and hyperthreading. It's probably documented somewhere, and a little experimentation should give you answers quite easily. That's the great thing with Python: you just fire up the interpreter and get the answer!
Now that I look at it, I seem to be able to pull information based on each core, and I can count cores. But what about counting processor sockets or packages? For example, Lets say, I do that simple loop and get a return of 16. How do I differentiate between 16 cores, or 8 cores with HyperThreading turned on? Admittedly, that's more an educational curiosity. The systems I'll be using all this on are readily accessible, and we'll know ahead of time that System A has 2 4-core processors and that we turned HT off in BIOS, so we should only see 8 logical processors when we test. Any delta from that will fail the test. So like I said, I was just curious if there is any built in way via WMI or whatever to differentiate without having to go and manually create a class based on the Windows API (because I'm not good enough to do that kind of work).
This is definitely the place to look for this kind of information: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa394373%28VS.85%29.aspx unfortunately, some of the useful information like NumberOfCores and NumberOfLogicalProcessors seems to be available only on the very latest releases. Might be an issue for you?
Either way, thanks for the help so far, the WMI wrapper is pretty cool. I've never written system level code before, beyond instrumenting some device drivers and services to see why they break, so this has been pretty fun so far as a learning experience.
Glad it's been useful. I'm just releasing a new version of the Python module which includes a little web server whichi lets you browse around the classes to a limited extent. If you're interested, let me know. TJG _______________________________________________ python-win32 mailing list python-win32@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-win32
