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by chrisweekly 82 days ago
> "We’ve tried to stay away from Docker as much as we can though because of the still pretty bad experience on Mac."

This seems to be a pretty common perspective, but isn't it mostly about Docker Desktop? Orbstack solved my complaints, and I'm genuinely curious if I'm missing something significant (which is def possible).
3 comments
pdimitar 82 days ago
To put things into perspective: we have an integration test suite that takes:

- 30 minutes with Colima on Mac;

- 20 minutes with OrbStack on Mac;

- 13 minutes on a weaker CPU (Ryzen 5500U) on a native Linux laptop;

- 14 minutes on a Ryzen 5600X and a virtualized Debian inside Windows 10 WSL2.

Pretty stark differences. Granted our test suite is mostly I/O bound but that really tells you something about the VM overhead on a Mac and the lack of an actual kernel-native containerization support on macOS.

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fabianlindfors 82 days ago
Orbstack is definitely much better but far from native speeds in my experience. From our perspective of wanting all users to have a good experience, we also can't really point folks towards Orbstack as a "solution" to make the local dev experience great.
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jsunderland323 82 days ago
I think this was a common perspective from early docker days with regard to local bind mounts (before docker switched from virtual box with hyperkit on macos). I do use Orb Stack and have noticed faster build times with Orb Stack but I haven't really noticed any difference in runtime performance between Orb Stack and Docker Desktop.
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pdimitar 82 days ago
There are differences, but I think most people's code does not expose macOS' suboptimal containerization performance is all. Check my comment sibling to yours. We have noticed very observable differences.

Until Apple adds a kernel-level containerization support (likely: never) then this difference in performance will continue to exist.

That being said, Orbstack really is the best on macOS. Docker Desktop is only slightly slower but much worse as an UX. Colima I appreciate for its full headless nature but it's severely behind in performance, sadly.

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