Programmatically find the number of cores on a machine

Question

Is there a way to determine how many cores a machine has from C/C++ in a platform-independent way? If no such thing exists, what about determining it per-platform (Windows/*

Answer 1

On Linux, it's may not be safe to to use _SC_NPROCESSORS_ONLN as it's not part of POSIX standard and the sysconf manual states as much. So there's a possibility that _SC_NPROCESSORS_ONLN may not be present:

 These values also exist, but may not be standard.

     [...]     

     - _SC_NPROCESSORS_CONF
              The number of processors configured.   
     - _SC_NPROCESSORS_ONLN
              The number of processors currently online (available).

A simple approach would be to read /proc/stat or /proc/cpuinfo and count them:

#include
#include

int main(void)
{
char str[256];
int procCount = -1; // to offset for the first entry
FILE *fp;

if( (fp = fopen("/proc/stat", "r")) )
{
  while(fgets(str, sizeof str, fp))
  if( !memcmp(str, "cpu", 3) ) procCount++;
}

if ( procCount == -1) 
{ 
printf("Unable to get proc count. Defaulting to 2");
procCount=2;
}

printf("Proc Count:%d\n", procCount);
return 0;
}

Using /proc/cpuinfo:

#include
#include

int main(void)
{
char str[256];
int procCount = 0;
FILE *fp;

if( (fp = fopen("/proc/cpuinfo", "r")) )
{
  while(fgets(str, sizeof str, fp))
  if( !memcmp(str, "processor", 9) ) procCount++;
}

if ( !procCount ) 
{ 
printf("Unable to get proc count. Defaulting to 2");
procCount=2;
}

printf("Proc Count:%d\n", procCount);
return 0;
}

---

The same approach in shell using grep:

grep -c ^processor /proc/cpuinfo

Or

grep -c ^cpu /proc/stat # subtract 1 from the result