Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tp34 1040 days ago
> And if you're running on Linux atleast, there's literally no overhead (containers are just processes tagged with C-groups, after all).

cgroups require code to implement. This is overhead. "Literally" is not the word you should be using. Perhaps "little" overhead or "minimal" overhead?

1 comments

I too am a pedant when it comes to using the word "literally" :)

IMO I'm using it correctly here though, let me explain.

Overhead is originally a business term that refers to an ongoing cost. Yes there is a small amount of code in the kernel that has to run, but my naive understanding is that this code also runs for processes that are not in a container (the kernel still needs to check whether the process is in a namespace or not). Additionally, I've never seen a benchmark that shows a workload performing worse when cgroups are applied. I'm happy to be proven wrong here but if this is the case, then there is no ongoing cost (and thus no overhead).