<p>Given a Pod defining a container that runs a single-threaded application, and a CPU limit value of <code>1</code>:</p>
<pre class="lang-yaml prettyprint-override"><code>apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: single-threaded-workload
spec:
  containers:
  - name: microservice
    image: single-threaded-workload
    resources:
      limits:
        cpu: &quot;1&quot;
      requests:
        cpu: 250m
</code></pre>
<p>Would the single-threaded application ever be CPU throttled?</p>
<p>Would increasing the CPU limit value to higher than <code>1</code> provide any performance benefit?</p>
<p>(This is assuming the container only has 1 active thread running)</p>

MichaelAttard
<p>CPU limits are not actually related to the available CPUs on the machine, but to the CFS (Compute Fair Scheduling) which is a mechanism used to determine how much CPU time can process consume. In short, <code>limits: 1 CPU</code> means that your process can consume the whole scheduler period (by default 100ms), it does not matter whether it consumes the whole period on a single CPU (1x100ms) or  2 half-periods (2x50ms=100ms) on two CPUs.
It is quite well explained in this article: <a href="https://wbhegedus.me/understanding-kubernetes-cpu-limits/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://wbhegedus.me/understanding-kubernetes-cpu-limits/</a></p>
