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Alpine Linux: Brilliant Linux Distro

wiki.alpinelinux.org

21–30 of 98 posts

Re: Alpine Linux: Brilliant Linux Distro

#21
Absolutely beautiful little OS - I love that it manages to balance well between being light, secure and rather versatile for server environments. I run it as a WireGuard & Docker server on a low-end VPS, and it just works without any problems at all thus far.

Its wiki does a fine job at being a pretty good resource for documentation, too, and both ArchWiki & Gentoo Wiki work well as fallbacks.

Re: Alpine Linux: Brilliant Linux Distro

#22
post #3

I seem to recall some pretty poor performance regressions in Docker containers versus equivalent Debian-based container configs.

Using musl instead of glibc leads to enough surprises that I've migrated my alpine containers over to Debian-slim based ones. If you have a bunch of containers built on the same base, the storage of Alpine vs Debian becomes less substantial, and you avoid a lot of weird bugs and a surprisingly large performance hit (at least for python)

Re: Alpine Linux: Brilliant Linux Distro

#23
Doesn't Alpine have a noticeable performance penalty due to being based on musl libc instead of glibc?

This seems to be born out in multiple people's micro benchmarks though how much of an issue it is for larger applications probably depends on the workload.

https://superuser.com/questions/1219609/why-is-the-alpine-do...

https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/benchmarking-debian-vs-alpine...

Re: Alpine Linux: Brilliant Linux Distro

#24
post #13

We use alpine based images extensively where possible. Most popular language ecosystems and tools have an alpine option. Alpine as a base image is nice because it's nearly blank, but easy to customize unlike distroless. Recently one tool did drop Alpine, most based on it's reduced performance, and that was envoyproxy.

That used to be huge a few years ago. But with both Ubuntu and Debian shipping much smaller images, I almost always find the hassle of using Alpine not worth it.

TIL there is a 29MB Minimal Ubuntu!

https://ubuntu.com/blog/minimal-ubuntu-released

Re: Alpine Linux: Brilliant Linux Distro

#26
I use it mostly as a build image in order to produce completely static binaries which isn't possible with most other distros because the glibc maintainers at some point in the distant past decided to impose their opinion on the matter upon you by making it impossible to statically link against glibc.

Re: Alpine Linux: Brilliant Linux Distro

#27
I recently deployed a small fleet of Dell thin clients around my house to run zwavejs2mqtt[1] via docker. I decided to use Alpine because the machines have 2GB of ram and 8GB of eMMC storage and I figured Alpine would minimize resource usage. They're working great so far!

[1]: https://github.com/zwave-js/zwavejs2mqtt

Re: Alpine Linux: Brilliant Linux Distro

#28
post #26

I use it mostly as a build image in order to produce completely static binaries which isn't possible with most other distros because the glibc maintainers at some point in the distant past decided to impose their opinion on the matter upon you by making it impossible to statically link against glibc.

It seems though that glibc was inspired by musl to move away from many small shared libraries to a single one, namely the dynamic linker executable also being lib{c,m,...}.

It's not at the same level, but it's progress...

Re: Alpine Linux: Brilliant Linux Distro

#29
post #26

I use it mostly as a build image in order to produce completely static binaries which isn't possible with most other distros because the glibc maintainers at some point in the distant past decided to impose their opinion on the matter upon you by making it impossible to statically link against glibc.

I really like statically linking everything. I think the trade off space is a lot different now though. But I still agree they shouldn’t have done that

Re: Alpine Linux: Brilliant Linux Distro

#30

Doesn't Alpine have a noticeable performance penalty due to being based on musl libc instead of glibc? This seems to be born out in multiple people's micro benchmarks though how much of an issue it is for larger applications probably depends on the workload. https://superuser.com/questions/1219609/why-is-the-alpine-do... https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/benchmarking-debian-vs-alpine...

I've tried alpine's gcc before and it was about 50% slower to compile a bunch of packages. That said, if you compile llvm with MinSize/-Os on glibc distro's it runs 50% slower too, so it's unclear if slowdown is due to musl libc or rather that they optimize for size instead of performance.
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