How to build single-threaded TensorFlow 2.x from source

Question

While building TensorFlow 2.x (for CPU) from source, what change should I make to force the TensorFlow not to use more than 1 threads? If this is not possible, what specific c++ statements (and in which cpp files) should I change to suppress the generation of multiple threads?

No matter what the number of cpus/cores are, I need 1 thread in total from TensorFlow 2.x.

Use top -H -b -n1 | grep program_name | wc -l to count the total number of threads.

Answer 1

The solution is in C++ the options you can give to a session:

// set the number of worker threads
    tensorflow::SessionOptions options;
    tensorflow::ConfigProto & configuration = options.config;
    configuration.set_inter_op_parallelism_threads(1);
    configuration.set_intra_op_parallelism_threads(1);
    configuration.set_use_per_session_threads(false); 

  mySession->reset(tensorflow::NewSession(options));

In this way you will have only a worker thread.

But this not ensure that top -H -b -n1 | grep program_name | wc -l command return 1 thread only. In fact in the above example we speeking about a worker thread, but for sure there is at least the main thread that manage the spawn and the return of the working threads.