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How does Docker affect energy consumption?

arxiv.org

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Re: How does Docker affect energy consumption?

#11

Post by rcarmo »

Honestly, I'd very much like to see more deep studies into container overhead - not just from a kernel standpoint, but actual tit-for-tat measures for storage and networking overhead that spanned the different filesystem options (I know that aufs is old hat, but I've used overlay and btrfs too) and, probably most importantly, the networking overhead.

I've had slowdowns in the order of 30% in terms of requests per second on some of my stuff inside Swarm as compared to running processes outside containers (arguably with four or five moving parts and entirely anecdotal, but still enough to give me pause), and I'd really like to understand how to shave this yak.

Re: How does Docker affect energy consumption?

#13

Post by bjackman »

kreetx wrote: post #10

Why not measure just processor load?

Power consumption is more complex than processor load - you have to think about how P-state (cpufreq) and C-state (cpuidle) selection is affected by the workload and now the scheduler distributes load across cores.

Re: How does Docker affect energy consumption?

#14

Post by progval »

bjackman wrote: post #13
kreetx wrote: post #10

Why not measure just processor load?

Power consumption is more complex than processor load - you have to think about how P-state (cpufreq) and C-state (cpuidle) selection is affected by the workload and now the scheduler distributes load across cores.

There are other factors to power consumption: type of instructions used (eg. cpuburn generates more heat than a regular 100% CPU usage), memory accesses, cache hits/misses, ...

Re: How does Docker affect energy consumption?

#16

Post by zxcmx »

By eyeballing the graphs it looks like "tl:dr", yes by about 10%, and sometimes just because a job takes longer.

Another thing to note is that redis and postgres are i/o heavy and many production environments (esp in aws) will choose not to dockerise i/o heavy stuff.

I wish they had included a statement like that so I didn't have to stick my neck out and give an eyeball estimate, but I suppose this kind of statement is harder to defend and the data they provided was more nuanced.

With that said, power is largely divorced from cost in actual operation except at extreme scale.

This is because purchaseable and billable units of compute are usually not utilised to 100% capacity, both in cloud and bare-metal situations. Another way to say this is, most people essentially prepay more "power budget" than they actually use.

Since a primary use of docker (esp via kube) is workload consolidation, it's hard to know what real impact this has on the world.

Re: How does Docker affect energy consumption?

#17

Post by lclarkmichalek »

StreamBright wrote: post #15

I would be interested in the overhead of systemd. Amazon decided to drop systemd in favor of sysv/upstart init. I guess this is based on energy consumption but could not find any info online.

Probably more likely due to the cost of breaking compatibility. It's probably the most popular rolling release distribution out there, and I imagine a large part of that is because they'll do anything they can to avoid breaking compatibility.

Re: How does Docker affect energy consumption?

#18

Post by StreamBright »

lclarkmichalek wrote: post #17
StreamBright wrote: post #15

I would be interested in the overhead of systemd. Amazon decided to drop systemd in favor of sysv/upstart init. I guess this is based on energy consumption but could not find any info online.

Probably more likely due to the cost of breaking compatibility. It's probably the most popular rolling release distribution out there, and I imagine a large part of that is because they'll do anything they can to avoid breaking compatibility.

I am not sure. In theory it is easy to convert init.d scripts to systemd service programatically. I see energy/CPU consumption a much bigger problem with it. We did some performance testing and systemd was using way much CPU time than sysv/upstart under similar cirtumstances. I guess the difference is huge when you apply it to 2M computers (this is how many Amazon used to have)

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-11-14/5-numbers-that-ill...

Re: How does Docker affect energy consumption?

#19

Post by supremesaboteur »

> We compare the energy consumption of various scenarios run on bare-metal Linux—that is, the applications are running on one kernel, without any virtualization at all—in contrast to Docker-managed containers, using “off-the-shelf” Docker images

Are docker containers at least more power efficient than virtual machines ?

Re: How does Docker affect energy consumption?

#20

Post by frik »

Would be interesting to see a comparison running WordPress, Redis, Postgres, etc on Linux: BareMetal vs VirtualBox vs VMware vs KVM (Qemu) vs XEN vs Docker, etc - with CPU, Memory, IO r/w and energy consumption (all measured from host system) on Intel server hardware with VT enabled. (Optionally also on AMD, ARM and POWER server hardware.)
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