In busy systems, GOMAXPROCS=cpu.limits will still lead to the process exceeding its cfs quota and be throttled as the Go runtime has additional threads beyond just GOMAXPROCS. IME, the only way to (nearly) guarantee there's no throttling is to set cpu.limits=GOMAXPROCS+1 to leave some room for these system threads. Unfortunately, there's broad adoption of uber/automaxprocs (which makes the same error) and utilizing the downward API to do this for other cases.