How to give full CPU power to VSTS build agent?

Question

I've created a private agents pool on VSTS.

Then downloaded the agent for linux, installed it on my Ubuntu 18.04 server and everything went fine.

The only problem is that I'm noticing that it isn't using the fully potential of the CPU. I'd like to give it all the available computational power, in order to speed up the builds.

Is there a way to do this? Or an article that I can read? I've googled around, but didn't find something useful...

I'm not hosting on Azure, my build machine is under my desk.

Thank you all! Caius

Answer 1

The Azure DevOps (VSTS) Agent really doesn't need much CPU power.

Think of the agent as an orchestrator of tasks that are executed in your pipelines (build or release). It is these tasks that may need the CPU horsepower. For example, if I execute a build as part of a build pipeline using my chosen build engine (Maven, Ant, Gradle, etc...) it is these build engines that I want to be able to utilize the fullest extent of my CPU rather than the orchestrator that called them.

Hope that helps!