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Comment by xienze | Hacker News Reader

Running a VM means you have to allocate X amount of RAM regardless if how much is actually needed by the containerized processes.

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You're still running a VM with this, just via xhyve and the OSX Hypervisor framework, rather than via Virtualbox or VMWare.

Which actually makes me wonder how they're managing memory for the VM hosting Docker here. Are they specifying a set fixed allocation? Is memory usage configurable somewhere?

Not quite configurable yet, but it appears that's the intention. (I wouldn't be surprised if they'll try to make that a bit more dynamic, if the hypervisor framework allows it.)

https://twitter.com/jdub/status/724724422574104576

Not necessarily, if I allocate 8GB to a VM, my systems still runs smoothly even when I'm already using 10GB (I have 16GB). One problem is that the VM won't clean up the RAM properly but the swap can handle that quite nicely actually. And I never utilize 16GB of ram, 8 would be more then enough for me and ram is really cheap these days (even on macs).

You must not run more than 1 chrome tab....

2 windows with 20-40 tabs each. Doesn't take up that much ram (less then 2GB). I never have more then 2 Windows of any application (e.g. Only 2 terminal Windows) because it breaks the shortcut to get to the previous window

You're still running a VM with Docker for Mac/Windows. It's just beautifully integrated and focused on the use case.

OK, my bad. For some reason I thought this was more tightly integrated, akin to being native containers.

Nope, VMs are demand paged like any other process.

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