Dockerd performance issues during simultaneous container creation

Docker Engine General
1

Hi all,

I’m tinkering with a small project that creates/manages a bunch of containers concurrently.

On one of my machines, container creation drops off a cliff when creating more than one container at a time.

I have a small benchmarking script here which runs “docker run --rm busybox” X times, with Y of them running at the same time.

The results are below. The last system, running Arch, is the problematic one. The “10 containers, 10 at a time” test is over 10 times slower on Arch than it is on OSX. Both operating systems are on the same hardware (2013 macbook pro), but on Arch it’s running natively rather than in Docker.app’s VM - It should be a lot faster on Arch.

The most obvious change to me at this point is that Arch has 17.04 (17.05 has similar performance), while the others have 17.03.

Any ideas about what is going on here?

# Ubuntu i7-6800K CPU @ 3.40GHz, 32GB, Docker Version 17.03.1-ce

Containers  Parallelism Runtime (seconds)

01          01          0.76
05          01          4.29
10          01          8.41
10          05          3.48
10          10          3.02
20          10          5.64
20          20          5.32

# OSX 10.12.4 Core i7-4960HQ @ 2.60GHz, Docker version 17.03.1-ce

  Note: Docker running in VM limited to 4 logical cores and 6GB memory:

Containers  Parallelism Runtime (seconds)

01          01           1.23
05          01           9.06
10          01          18.48
10          05           5.76
10          10           6.85
20          10          17.92
20          20          26.77

# Arch Core i7-4960HQ @ 2.60GHz, 16GB, Docker Version 17.04.0-ce

Containers  Parallelism Runtime (seconds)

01          01           0.76
05          01           4.65
10          01           8.74
10          05          50.29
10          10          27.21
20          10          65.05
20          20          44.40

Thanks,
-Adam