What does a number of cores of "~2, bursted" mean?

Question

According to the docs the sudo-enabled environment offers "~2" cores, "bursted". I don't understand what that is supposed to mean.

I think there's a hint in this blog post:

The build containers in our legacy build infrastructure have had 1.5 cores (with burst capacity)

Sadly I don't know what "burst capacity" is.

I have asked this question before on the Travis CI issue tracker but since I got no answer I hope that I may find one here.

Answer 1

I'm not familiar with Travis, so I'll just explain what it usually means when you're allowed to burst the guaranteed CPU time in a container.

This is usually used to mean that you always have 2 cores available but you may get more CPU time for a short time. In particular, you're allowed to use CPU time not consumed by others. For instance, if someone on the host only uses 1.5 of the 2 available cores, the 0.5 unused cores become available to the others on the same host.