Error response from deamon: i/o timeout

Docker Desktop for Windows
1

For a few months now our team has seen issues with running docker desktop for windows. Everything works fine until it seems to crash and becomes unreachable.

docker ps results in
Error response from deamon: i/o timeout

ping docker.io results in
Request timed out

kubectl get pods results in
Unable to connect to the server: net/http: TLS handshake timeout

Restarting docker desktop doesn’t resolve the issue. Restarting the OS seems to fix it sometimes.

I’m curious if anybody else has seen this issue? We have been trying to solve this internally on the network but haven’t found any reason why this would be caused by the network. Also when using docker without docker desktop for windows we don’t have this issue. So that’s why we suspect it might have to do with docker desktop.

Any help would be apreciated. Thank you in advance :slight_smile:

OS: Windows 10
Docker Desktop for windows (latest)

2

We get the same “Error response from deamon: i/o timeout” when calling docker-compose up. Same as you, usually, restarting the system or docker desktop works.

OS is also Windows 10.

I read about possible DNS issues but did not try this until now. (The issues I found regarding this wer=re more than two years ago)

Most likely it’s this though: Error response from daemon: i/o timeout · Issue #12907 · docker/for-win · GitHub

3

I have the same problem, and I noticed when update DDEV because docker pull a new image from docker hub. I can login with desktop app but I can’t login with docker login command in terminal and and neither does the daemon.

I test all releases from newest to old and 4.7.1 release is the latest that works correctly.

I am investigating what is the reason, but by the way is a particular solution when I need pull a new image from docker hub.

PD: After update images from Docker, always can apply a Docker update to the latest release for better improvements and performance provided from the latest releases.

4

I think I have found the solution to the timeout problem.

To be able to login without problems, you must activate the “Manual proxy configuration” in Configuration > Resources > Proxies.

docker-desktop-cfg-proxies
docker-desktop-cfg-proxies835×463 22.2 KB

I dont have Proxy but It runs correctly :dizzy_face:.

P.D: Nowadays I running docker-ce on WSL2 (Ubuntu) and It’s extremely fast. (Recommended)

5

I had a similar issue on a recent project and was able to fix it by setting resource limits on my containers.

My containers were dropping every 3 or 4 days and, each time, Docker would become unresponsive. Any Docker command after this point would return “Error response from daemon: i/o timeout”. The only way to recover the Docker daemon was to kill all Docker processes via Task Manager and then restart the OS.

This seems to mostly affect Docker Desktop on Windows with a virtualised Linux backend

In my case, I had a container that was holding on to an increasing amount of memory, eventually maxing out the memory available to the VM. Docker would typically detect an Out Of Memory error and kill the container to protect its own components (the daemon, engine, etc). However, in my case, Docker did not kill the container, so the daemon ran out of resources and crashed.

Setting resource limits prevented the container from maxing out the VM’s available resources, so the container stayed healthy and the daemon stopped crashing.

Example docker-compose config:

my-service:
    container_name: my-container
    image: my-image:latest
    deploy:
      resources:
        limits:
          memory: 600M

I hope this helps.