Turns at once

Two different settings limit how much runs at once, and they’re not the same thing.

Agent turns at once is a project setting, in Project Settings → Agents. It caps how many CLI turns across all your agents can be running at the same moment — it counts turns, not agents, since a parked or waiting agent isn’t using one.

Turns at once is a per-machine setting, on the Machines page under “How this machine runs.” It’s the ceiling the machine itself enforces when it spawns a CLI process. It defaults to Auto, which sizes the number from that computer’s own memory and cores rather than a fixed guess — the right choice for almost everyone. You can instead pick a fixed number (1 through 8); past 8 the real limit becomes memory, not this setting, so it stops offering higher numbers. Whatever you pick is a request: the machine reports back what it’s actually running as “last reported N,” and that can differ from what you asked for, because an operator’s own machine configuration can override it, and a machine short on memory refuses to start a turn regardless of what’s set.

Either way, the machine also watches its own memory and load in the moment. If it’s under pressure, it holds a turn back rather than starting it, and says so where that turn is waiting rather than warning about it in advance.

This setting needs a newer flowviant on the machine; if yours hasn’t reported a recent enough version, the Machines page explains that instead of showing the control.