[Jtsummers]

What's your preference instead of Docker? Just run everything on the same host OS? Nix? More conventional VMs? Servers with specific configurations?

[andrewguy9]

When possible I want to run my apps on OSX. It’s not always possible, but usually works.

The scripting environment managers have made big improvements in the past few years. Nvm/virtualenv/rvm give me 90% of the docker value prop with none of the performance impact or debug hassle.

Haskell/clojure/java all seem platform agnostic out of the box.

C/C++ is probably still a hassle with libs being platform specific.

[vbezhenar]

The question is, why docker have that overhead. Virtualizing should not be very resource-intensive nowadays, everything is optimized at CPU level.

[soraminazuki]

It's not that simple as "everything is optimized at CPU level," actually. Virtualization has very different performance impacts on different workloads.

[andrewguy9]

Virtualization has pretty high overhead.

But on the Mac you have to pay the virtualization overhead to run Linux in a VM, then compound the docker overhead on top of that.

On MacBook Pro this is problematic because it eats battery and contributes to thermal problems.

[andrewguy9]

Forgot to mention that disk performance on docker on the Mac is a big deal for building software.

This article shows overhead for a disk heavy workload: https://vivait.co.uk/labs/docker-for-mac-performance-using-n...

He gets 7 second load time natively, but a 56 second load on docker with inconsistent drive link.