Simple example of gang scheduling of processes in Python?

Question

I have a pool of processes that need to be executed. I would like to fully utilize the machine, so that all CPUs are executing processes. I do not want to over-subscribe the system, so what i really want is #executing_processes=#cpus at any given moment. I also need to store the stdout,stderr and return code of each completed processes. How can this be achieved in Python?

EDIT: by 'process' i mean a shell process.

Answer 1

If you are talking about your own, Python-implemented processes:

The multiprocessing module gives you the ability to spawn multiple processes. In particular, it sounds like you would want to create multiprocessing.cpu_count numbers of processes, potentially in a Pool.

If you are talking about separate programs that you want to execute through the shell:

The subprocess module will let you spawn processes through its Popen class, which has parameters for stdin, stdout, sterr that accept file-like objects. Popen.returncode can be used to check the return code.