The navigator.hardwareConcurrency read-only property returns the number of logical processors available to run threads on the user's computer.

A Number indicating the number of logical processor cores.

Modern computers have multiple physical processor cores in their CPU (two or four cores is typical), but each physical core is also usually able to run more than one thread at a time using advanced scheduling techniques. So a four-core CPU may offer eight logical processor cores, for example. The number of logical processor cores can be used to measure the number of threads which can effectively be run at once without them having to context switch.

The browser may, however, choose to report a lower number of logical cores in order to represent more accurately the number of Workers that can run at once, so don't treat this as an absolute measurement of the number of cores in the user's system.

In this example, one Worker is created for each logical processor reported by the browser and a record is created which includes a reference to the new worker as well as a Boolean value indicating whether or not we're using that worker yet; these objects are, in turn, stored into an array for later use. This creates a pool of workers we can use to process requests later.

The following code can be run in a worker:

let workerList = [];

for (let i = 0; i < navigator.hardwareConcurrency; i++) {
  let newWorker = {
    worker: new Worker("cpuworker.js"),
    inUse: false,
  };
  workerList.push(newWorker);
}

• WorkerNavigator