Unable to bypass psutil (requesting feature to force constant mode)

Hello, thank you for your work on CodeCarbon!

I'm currently using CodeCarbon to estimate energy usage in a machine learning setting, where I track short training iterations (e.g forward pass, backward pass, etc).

I'm observing a significant overhead when using CodeCarbon v3.0.2:

• Full training time without CodeCarbon: 11 seconds
• Full training time with CodeCarbon v3.0.2: 1 minute 55 seconds

I'm working in an environment without RAPL, PowerGadget, or PowerMetrics. I identified the overhead as coming from repeated calls to psutil.cpu_percent(interval=0.5), which takes 0.5 seconds per call. In contrast, when I use CodeCarbon v2.8.4 (before psutil support) it incurrs negligible overhead (<1s).

I am therefore trying to bypass using psutil (i.e. bypassing CPU Load mode). I attempted to force CodeCarbon into constant mode by uninstalling psutil, expecting it to fall back as it does for unavailable backends like RAPL or PowerGadget. However, this leads to a ModuleNotFoundError due to an unconditional import of psutil in core/cpu.py.

Looking into the source, I saw that CodeCarbon uses the following health check:

is_psutil_available():
    try:
        nice = psutil.cpu_times().nice
        if nice > 0.0001:
            return True
        else:
            logger.debug(
                f"is_psutil_available() : psutil.cpu_times().nice is too small : {nice} !"
            )
            return False
    except Exception as e:
        logger.debug(
            "Not using the psutil interface, an exception occurred while instantiating "
            + f"psutil.cpu_times : {e}",
        )
        return False

This differs for example from is_powergadget_available() which explicitly looks for the Power Gadget executable.

Would it be possible to:

• Add a parameter (e.g. force_mode_constant=True) to explicitly force constant mode, similar to force_mode_cpu_load
• Or change the psutil import logic to allow it to fail gracefully when the module is missing, rather than assuming it will always be installed

Alternatively, do you know of a way to make the call to is_psutil_available() fail?

Thanks again for maintaining this project!