TIL: Proposal to Make GOMAXPROCS Container-aware

One of my former colleagues, Michael Pratt, created a proposal for the Go runtime’s GOMAXPROCS to take into account the process’s CPU limits imposed by cgroups. The goal is for Go to be more container-aware because cgroup CPU limits are the main way that container runtimes enforce resource constraints.

I’m really excited to see this added to Go because I adhere to the philosophy that processes should need to know as little as possible about the infrastructure that they are being run on. Currently, almost every production Go application running in a container needs to incorporate code like uber-go/automaxprocs to take into account CPU limits.

The proposal that Michael writes is very thorough and brings up issues like the fact that CPU quota allows for bursting while GOMAXPROCS does not. These are some of the tradeoffs that users of uber-go/automaxprocs already have to deal with however.