A good value to start with would be the number of CPU cores on the machine. Setting a higher value would cause each build to take longer, but could increase the overall throughput. For example, one build might be CPU-bound, while a second build running at the same time might be I/O-bound — so the second build could take advantage of the spare I/O capacity at that moment.
Agents (nodes that are not the built-in node) must have at least one executor. To temporarily prevent any builds from being executed on an agent, use the Mark this node temporarily offline button on the agent's page.
For the built-in node, set the number of executors to zero to prevent it from executing builds locally on the controller. Note: The built-in node will always be able to run flyweight tasks including Pipeline's top-level task.