Linux – the runtime performance cost of a Docker container

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I'd like to comprehensively understand the run-time performance cost of a Docker container. I've found references to networking anecdotally being ~100µs slower.

I've also found references to the run-time cost being "negligible" and "close to zero" but I'd like to know more precisely what those costs are. Ideally I'd like to know what Docker is abstracting with a performance cost and things that are abstracted without a performance cost. Networking, CPU, memory, etc.

Furthermore, if there are abstraction costs, are there ways to get around the abstraction cost. For example, perhaps I can mount a disk directly vs. virtually in Docker.

Best Answer

An excellent 2014 IBM research paper “An Updated Performance Comparison of Virtual Machines and Linux Containers” by Felter et al. provides a comparison between bare metal, KVM, and Docker containers. The general result is: Docker is nearly identical to native performance and faster than KVM in every category.

The exception to this is Docker’s NAT — if you use port mapping (e.g., docker run -p 8080:8080), then you can expect a minor hit in latency, as shown below. However, you can now use the host network stack (e.g., docker run --net=host) when launching a Docker container, which will perform identically to the Native column (as shown in the Redis latency results lower down).

Docker NAT overhead

They also ran latency tests on a few specific services, such as Redis. You can see that above 20 client threads, highest latency overhead goes Docker NAT, then KVM, then a rough tie between Docker host/native.

Docker Redis Latency Overhead

Just because it’s a really useful paper, here are some other figures. Please download it for full access.

Taking a look at Disk I/O:

Docker vs. KVM vs. Native I/O Performance

Now looking at CPU overhead:

Docker CPU Overhead

Now some examples of memory (read the paper for details, memory can be extra tricky):

Docker Memory Comparison

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