<p>I am trying to run a load test on GKE, which means that I want to run a high number of tasks, most of which require very little resources. However, most of them fail to schedule saying "Failed for reason PodExceedsMaxPodNumber and possibly others". The number of pods per node is governed by the <code>max-pods</code> flag in Kubelet, and the default is 40. This is clearly too low for what I am trying to do – my CPU utilization doesn't go over 30%. Is there any way I can change this setting when creating a Kubernetes cluster using GKE?</p>

<p>Unfortunately not all of the various components' command line flags are modifiable when starting a GKE cluster. If you're just trying to run a one-off load test, you could manually modify the flags passed to the Kubelet on each node, but since that flag isn't even controllable by Kubernetes's Salt templates, there isn't even an option to control it with an environment variable.</p>

<p>The value was chosen due to performance limitations and will be drastically bumped up (to 100) in version 1.2 of Kubernetes, which is scheduled for release in March.</p>
