Agent Capacity Calculator
Calculate how many concurrent jobs a fleet of Jenkins agents can support.
About Agent Capacity Calculator
Each agent's theoretical daily capacity is its available hours divided by the average build duration; multiplying by agent count gives the fleet's theoretical maximum. Real fleets never hit 100% utilization — time is lost to provisioning, queueing gaps, retries, and idle periods — so multiplying by a realistic utilization factor (commonly 60–80% for busy CI fleets) converts the theoretical ceiling into an achievable daily throughput estimate.
Formula
buildsPerDay = agents × (hoursPerDay / avgBuildTimeHrs) × utilization
- A
- Number of agents
- H
- Available hours per day
- t_b
- Average build time in hours
- u
- Utilization factor (0 to 1)
- B
- Estimated builds per day
Worked example
With the default values below, Agent Capacity Calculator returns Estimated Builds per Day of 1,008.0. Change any input above and every figure here is recalculated in your browser.
Inputs used
- Number of Agentsaccepts 1–100,000 agents
- 10 agents
- Available Hours per Dayaccepts 0.1–24 hr
- 24 hr
- Average Build Timeaccepts 0.01–1,440 min
- 10 min
- Utilizationaccepts 1–100
- 70
Results
- Estimated Builds per Day
- 1,008.0 builds
- Builds per Agent per Day
- 100.80 builds
- Theoretical Max (100% Utilization)
- 1,440.0 builds
Step by step
- 1Theoretical builds/day = agents × (hours ÷ avg build time)= 1440.0 builds
- 2Actual builds/day = theoretical × utilization= 1008.0 builds
Assumptions and limits
- The result is derived only from the 4 inputs listed above. Anything not among them is not part of the calculation.
- In particular, this calculator does not take inflation, tax, fees or charges or compounding frequency into account.
- Figures are rounded for display to 2 decimal places, so totals built from several rounded parts can differ slightly from the unrounded arithmetic.
How these calculators are built and tested is described on the Methodology page. If a figure looks wrong, please report it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What utilization rate should I use?
70% is a reasonable default for actively used CI fleets; ephemeral cloud agents that spin up on-demand can approach 85–90%, while static agent pools with uneven load across timezones or teams often sit closer to 50–60%.
How does this differ from the executor requirement calculator?
This calculator estimates achievable throughput from a fixed fleet size; the executor requirement calculator works in the opposite direction, solving for how many executors are needed to hit a target throughput.
Does agent count here mean executors or physical/VM agents?
It represents build agents each assumed to run one build at a time; if agents run multiple executors concurrently, multiply agent count by executors-per-agent first to get an equivalent single-build-slot count.