Improve Docker performance on macOS by 20x
1–10 of 18 posts
Re: Improve Docker performance on macOS by 20x
#2This has been known and grudgingly tolerated by every team I’ve been on that uses Docker. Occasionally someone will get sick of it and introduce something like docker-sync [1], essentially just to rsync a directory instead of using a volume, then later someone else will find an issue with it and rip it out… usually on a 2-4 year cadence. It’s amazing this is still an issue for Docker Desktop on both Mac and Windows.
With their new nagging un-skippable updates, the future isn’t looking bright for this product.
[1] - http://docker-sync.io/
Re: Improve Docker performance on macOS by 20x
#3You can improve performance a tremendously by limiting number of files within directories that can be used as volumes under settings
Re: Improve Docker performance on macOS by 20x
#4In my experience, gRPC FUSE[1] volume mount improves performance quite a bit, and we only observe up to 10% performance decrease when using volume mounts instead of code living on the DockerForMac VM.
However, I do wonder, if Docker Desktop performance is worse than running Docker on VM in multipass/VirtualBox/VMWare, even if there is no file sharing from host OS.
[1] - https://www.docker.com/blog/deep-dive-into-new-docker-deskto...
Re: Improve Docker performance on macOS by 20x
#5Can you retest with experimental virtualization enabled? At least on my M1 this boosted performance a LOT (in addition to using gRPC FUSE mounts, as a other commenter also posted)
Re: Improve Docker performance on macOS by 20x
#6it's not really an improvement if you have to run your dev environment inside a VM, with the inconvenience of not having access to the files in the host.
Re: Improve Docker performance on macOS by 20x
#7This has been known and grudgingly tolerated by every team I’ve been on that uses Docker. Occasionally someone will get sick of it and introduce something like docker-sync [1], essentially just to rsync a directory instead of using a volume, then later someone else will find an issue with it and rip it out… usually on a 2-4 year cadence. It’s amazing this is still an issue for Docker Desktop on both Mac and Windows.…
Agreed, and now they're charging up to $21 per user per month for large enterprises to use Docker Desktop for Mac after years of ignoring the community on issues like this.
Granted, you can still build and install the docker cli and use it to interface with the daemon running inside of a VM for free, but I doubt it'll be long until they close that loophole. My guess is they'll either move docker cli under the same licensing umbrella or simply make it too difficult for most users to build and run in a standalone fashion on MacOS.
Re: Improve Docker performance on macOS by 20x
#8Hate its popularity at my job.. it’s fine if you want to use it for a tech stack in the background like a db or cloud emulation.. but call me old fashioned I think if you’re walking around calling yourself a software engineer, loading up software and tools is part of the job.
Re: Improve Docker performance on macOS by 20x
#9Maybe a dumb question, but are they running M1 with the ARM version of Docker & Ruby? I imagine it’s probably difficult to accidentally get the AMD64 version, but I didn’t see that detail in the benchmark
Re: Improve Docker performance on macOS by 20x
#10Maybe a dumb question, but are they running M1 with the ARM version of Docker & Ruby? I imagine it’s probably difficult to accidentally get the AMD64 version, but I didn’t see that detail in the benchmark
author here. M1 was running arm images, but as far as I know Docker Desktop on M1 use Qemu which is super slow anyway.