Docker very very slowly with laravel and wsl

Docker Desktop
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1

Hello everyone,

I’m new to Docker and I recently created an image containing multiple containers using PHP 7.4, MySQL, phpMyAdmin, and Redis.

My containers are working fine, but I’ve noticed that my Laravel site is very slow to load. I’m using WSL on Windows 11 Pro, and I don’t mount the “vendor” directory of Laravel via WSL because I read online that it can cause performance issues.

I’ve created a volume for the “vendor” directory and executed the “composer update” command directly inside the PHP container. Everything seems to be working fine, but the site is still very slow.

I would like to ask if someone could take a look at my Dockerfile and docker-compose files and possibly identify the cause of this slowness.

Thank you sincerely for your valuable assistance.

docker-compose.yml

version: '3'

services:
  php:
    image: php:7.4-apache
    ports:
      - 80:80
      - 443:443
    volumes:
      - /mnt/c/dev/web:/var/www/html/
      - /var/www/html/vendor
    networks:
      - my_network
    depends_on:
      - mysql
      - redis
  mysql:
    image: mysql:8.0
    environment:
      MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: 123456
      MYSQL_DATABASE: myDatabase
      MYSQL_USER: myDatabase
      MYSQL_PASSWORD: 123456
    networks:
      - my_network
    volumes:
      - /mnt/c/dev/myDatabase/docker/sql:/docker-entrypoint-initdb.d

  phpmyadmin:
    image: phpmyadmin/phpmyadmin
    ports:
      - 8080:80
    environment:
      PMA_HOST: mysql
    networks:
      - my_network
    depends_on:
      - mysql

  redis:
    image: redis:latest
    networks:
      - my_network

networks:
  my_network:

and my Dockerfile

# Use a base image with Apache and PHP 7.4
FROM php:7.4-apache

RUN export COMPOSER_ALLOW_SUPERUSER=1;

RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y \
    libzip-dev \
    libmagickwand-dev \
    libfreetype6-dev \
    libjpeg62-turbo-dev \
    libpng-dev \
    libxml2-dev \
    libcurl4-openssl-dev \
    libonig-dev \
    libssl-dev \
    openssl \
    nano \
    locate \
    supervisor \
    openssh-server \
    git \
    curl \
    libpng-dev \
    libonig-dev \
    libxml2-dev \
    libzip-dev \
    libicu-dev \
    && docker-php-ext-install zip \
    && docker-php-ext-configure intl \
    && docker-php-ext-install intl \
    && docker-php-ext-install pdo_mysql mbstring exif pcntl bcmath gd


RUN pecl uninstall imagick
RUN pecl install imagick && docker-php-ext-enable imagick

RUN curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php -- --install-dir=/usr/local/bin --filename=composer

COPY sites-available/apache2.conf /etc/apache2/apache2.conf
COPY sites-available/000-default.conf /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf
COPY sites-available/default-ssl.conf /etc/apache2/sites-available/default-ssl.conf
COPY sites-available/web.conf /etc/apache2/sites-available/web.conf

RUN mkdir -p /var/lock/apache2 /var/run/apache2 /var/run/sshd /var/log/supervisor
COPY supervisor/supervisord.conf /etc/supervisor/conf.d/supervisord.conf


RUN a2ensite web.conf

RUN a2enmod ssl
RUN a2enmod rewrite

COPY ssl/certificat.crt /etc/ssl/certs/apache-selfsigned.crt
COPY ssl/private.key /etc/ssl/private/apache-selfsigned.key

COPY vendor_default /var/www/html/vendor

EXPOSE 80
EXPOSE 443
EXPOSE 22

RUN updatedb


# Change permissions for the "vendor" directory
RUN chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/vendor
RUN chmod -R 755 /var/www/html/vendor

CMD ["apache2-foreground"]
CMD ["/usr/bin/supervisord"]
2

If a volume maps host folders to container folders, it will be inevitably slow. In WSL2 windows paths are 2nd class citizens mounted through a p9 network share. The only way to speed things up is to not map windows paths to container paths.

It is fast if the code is stored in the WSL2 file system (in every path except /mnt and its subfolders) and mapped to a container.

You should try the forum search, it should yield plenty of discussions to this topic.