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Comment by afandian | Hacker News Reader

I sometimes wonder what the overhead of Docker costs on a Mac. The fact that you have to run a whole linux VM, with guest OS, then send data back and forth over that, especially with volume mapping. I'm sure it can be quantified over running linux directly on the same hardware.

My machine (MacBook Pro 13-inch, 2018, 2.7 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7, 16 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3) often runs screaming hot (with screaming fans too), when I only have a browser, zoom, docker and IntelliJ running, and I wonder what went wrong.

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Yeah, it’s pretty crazy especially when you’ve got a bunch of bind mounts. My current machine is a 2013 MBA and after cumulative 100+ hours of fighting with docker over the years, I finally gave up and started using remote development in VSCode on a Linux server. That was a great decision.

Last time I tried that the network file serving was a bottleneck. But I guess there comes a point where you have to choose your bottleneck.

VSC is the real workhorse here. It’s way beyond something like an SSHFS mount. The server actually runs an instance of VSC. It’s really quite good and I don’t even notice I’m editing on another machine. Would recommend trying it.

Thanks, today I learned something. I'll try it out.

All the more disappointing that Jetbrains won't support a language server beyond Intellij.

Yeah, Docker is an issue for me as well. Great idea! Thanks! Care to share any more details? Who is hosting what configuration?

Just google VSCode Remote Development. It’s very easy to setup. I personally use a Scaleway machine.

Glad to hear this has gone well. My current plan is to stick a Linux workstation under my desk and then use my MacBook for remote vscode.

Have you tried Turbo Boost Switcher?

It does wonders for my 2019 16 MBP, ensuring the fans very rarely kick in and CPU temps stay reasonable doing similar workloads to what you describe.

> I sometimes wonder what the overhead of Docker costs on a Mac.

I wouldn't use Docker on a Mac. The fan goes like crazy the whole time, and the battery life is like an hour or less. Whereas with vagrant and virtualbox the fan stays off and the battery lasts all day.

The memory approaches the limit and MacOS starts to compress it which is CPU intensive. Try to limit RAM for Docker VM.

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