Re: [PATCH] md5: accepts a new --threads option

[Pádraig Brady]

Pádraig Brady wrote:
> Giuseppe Scrivano wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> inspired by the attempt to make `sort' multi-threaded, I added threads
>> support to md5sum and the sha* programs family.  It has effect only when
>> multiple files are specified.
>>
>> Any comment?
> 
> How does it compare to:
> 
> files_per_process=10
> cpus=4
> find files | xargs -n$files_per_process -P$cpus md5sum
> 
> I would expect it to be a bit better as file_per_process
> could be very large, thus having less overhead in starting
> processes. Though is the benefit worth the extra implementation
> complexity and new less general interface for users?

Hi James,

I was wondering would it be worth adding the nproc module to xargs
to support -P without any options to use the number of CPUs
as the value.

Hmm, I could see it being useful to specify NCPUs-1 also.
I wonder is there a general external method to determine
the number of CPUs.

cheers,
Pádraig.