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I have a shell script. In that script I am starting 6 new processes. My system has 4 CPUs. If I run the shell script the new processes spawned are automatically allocated to the one of the CPUs by default by the operating system. Now, I want to reduce the total time of running of my script. Is there a way that I can check a processor's free utilization and then chose one to run my process?

I do not want to run a process on a CPU which is >75% utilized. I would wait instead and run on a CPU which is <75% utilized.

I need to program my script in such a way that it should check the 4 CPUs' utilization and then run the process on the chosen CPU.

Can someone please help me with an example?

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    You don't need to do anything. The scheduler will do a much better job than you of selecting a core to run on. If your jobs can be run in parallel, then do so. Which core to run on is a detail that you should not worry about. Commented Jul 30, 2013 at 14:11

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I recommend GNU Parallel:

GNU parallel is a shell tool for executing jobs in parallel using one or more computers. A job can be a single command or a small script that has to be run for each of the lines in the input. The typical input is a list of files, a list of hosts, a list of users, a list of URLs, or a list of tables. A job can also be a command that reads from a pipe. GNU parallel can then split the input and pipe it into commands in parallel.

In addition, use nice.

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You can tell the scheduler that a certain CPU should be used, using the taskset command:

taskset -c 1 process

will tell the scheduler that process should run on CPU1.

However, I think in most cases the built-in Linux scheduler should work well.

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Btw, on BSD there is a similar command called cpuset with slight different option names. It would be: cpuset -l 1 process on BSD

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