Tweaking xargs to keep cores busier without needing -n

[James Youngman]

Oops, now really with a different subject.

2011/5/31 James Youngman <address@hidden>:
> [ CC += bug-findutils, += Paolo, -= bug-coreutils ]
>
> 2009/11/3 Pádraig Brady <address@hidden>:
>> Pádraig Brady wrote:
>>> Paolo Bonzini wrote:
>>>> Maybe we want a --parallel option (too bad -p is taken) for xargs that
>>>> forces the creation of the number of processes passed with -P or taken
>>>> from nproc (for example by starting "md5sum $1 $5 $9 ...", "md5sum $2 $6
>>>> $10 ...", etc.)?
>>>> That would be an interesting alternative to this core-count proposal...
>>>
>>> I'm not sure what you mean here.
>>> I already suggested to the xargs maintainer that `xargs -P`
>>> should be equivalent to xargs -P$(nproc).
>>> `nproc` as an external command would still be useful though.
>>
>> Here's a patch for that.
>> It needs to be updated to reference the new gnulib
>> when Bruno's nproc update hits gnulib.
>
> I'm sorry, I totally missed this email because although it was sent to
> me it got buried under a ton of gnulib stuff.
>
> As I understand things the intent of the patch is to (optionally I
> suppose) make xargs keener to keep the CPUs busy (or whatever else
> we're parallelising over I guess), even if it needs to launch
> processes with short command lines to do so?   That is With -P N, if
> there are less than N running children and xargs reads an argument it
> should launch a new child process?   If that's the approximate idea, I
> think that there could be use cases for this.
>
> Could we discuss this aspect on bug-findutils instead?   Hence I
> changed the subject and the CC list...
>
> Thanks,
> James.
>