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Comment by perceptronas | Hacker News Reader

Docker for Mac is not usable today, because of high cpu due IO [1]

[1] https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/1759

It is usable for the vast majority of users. If it is causing an issue please file a detailed bug report, with diagnostic ID, also try the Edge releases, and give some information about what you are actually running, for example how to replicate it. Most of the bug reports in that thread are totally unhelpful. Quite likely it is not even the same cause for different people, as some people said it was fixed on Edge while others did not. Even a single well thought out detailed bug report would make it much easier to investigate the issue.

Are you sure it works for vast majority of users? At least in my developers circle who use macOS for web* development - all of them have issues with docker high cpu usage due IO. Some use docker-sync to go around the issue.

As for bug reports - zero feedback from anyone on that thread from maintainers. If you are one of the maintainers - it might be good to write this comment on that thread instead of HN

* - I understand that web developers might be a small percentage of users and my case doesn't represent everybody

I am not a maintainer but do work on LinuxKit which is used. If docker-sync helps, then that suggests that you have an issue specifically related to file sharing. Please file a new issue, do not add to this one, which explains how to reproduce your development setup. Different setups work very differently (eg polling vs notifications), and people use things very differently, there is no one set of tooling and setup that is "web development", but it sounds like in your company you all use similar tools and setup, so it is not surprising you all have the same issue. We have a performance guide here https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-mac/osxfs/ that covers some use cases.

My team of 10 use it extensively for local testing of our stack. None of us have seen the CPU issue.

I have 60-65% CPU usage at idle - it's not ideal for battery life but it is usable and I'd say it's easier to use than minikube (which is something that I also use a lot). This is very early for DfM + K8s - I'd say the usability outlays teething issues.

If you want to help send in diagnostic reports for the Docker guys.

60% at idle is a big no no for laptops.

I run 10-15 containers on my Mac and don't notice it after fixing particular containers (I don't doubt there is a more general issue)

Find out what is causing the CPU spikes with

    docker stats

or screen into the Docker for Mac VM and diagnose with top etc.

    screen ~/Library/Containers/com.docker.docker/Data/com.docker.driver.amd64-linux/tty

I found particular containers were causing the issues and fixed it with alternate builds, prior versions or resource limitations on containers

Docker for Mac/Windows is a great product - it has allowed me to roll out Docker to developers who wouldn't otherwise deal with Vagrant or other solutions

I haven't run into that issue, but another issue that will likely trip up a lot of devs is the extremely slow shared volume support. [1] Mounting a database directory from the host is pretty much a no-go. Mounting source trees (e.g. React app with hot code reloading) less so, but still much slower than native. Many devs have resorted to workarounds such as NFS or rsync.

[1] https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/77

I've not had any problem with it, and the high high productivity win of being able to tell people just to turn Kubernetes in Docker on is amazing so far.

Right now, I am running 10 containers on my Mac, and my highest CPU in Intellej. Docker is running consistently with about 5-10% of the CPU.

Docker for Mac is running in VM anyway, these kind of issues related to slow IO was around more than year. Main reason I run linux on my macbook

I've never noticed this issue with the stable version. However I'm experiencing high CPU usage whenever I start minikube on my Mac.

I just installed Docker edge. We'll see how it goes in the long run but so far with k8s enabled hyperkit uses 25% of a virtual core.

This is a Kubernetes issue, the same issue on Minikube and Docker for Mac. The Kube API server uses a lot of CPU when idle. We are trying to diagnose what is happening.

yea it cpu usage goes down if i disable kubernetes.

Also noticed this with the version of Kubernetes that comes with DfM. hyperkit consumes around 35% CPU while idle, which amounts to around double the idle battery drain on my MBP.

Subscribed. Thanks for sharing this thread as Docker for Mac has always had performance issues for me too. Even when no containers are running I find it using significant resources all the time.

Oh man. Thanks for sharing this. I thought it was just my Mac.

I have a Dropbox running inside a container on my Mac. Even though there is minimal activity on the account it drains the battery like crazy. Native Dropbox client isn’t great in that regard, but it feels like there is an order of magnitude difference.

I am using it to run Microsoft SQL Server for Linux and haven't had a problem with high CPU usage.

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