CPU Share Definition

The term “share” is used to define a portion of the system's CPU resources that are allocated to a project. The larger the number of CPU shares assigned to a project, the more CPU resources it receives from the fair share scheduler, relative with other projects.

CPU shares are not equivalent to percentages of CPU resources. Shares are used to define the relative importance of workloads in relation to other workloads. When you assign CPU shares to a project, your predominant concern is not how many shares the project has. First, you need to know how many shares the project has in comparison with other projects. Second you need to know how many of those other projects are competing with the project for CPU resources.

Processes in projects with zero shares always run at the lowest system priority (0). These processes only run when projects with nonzero shares are not using CPU resources.