Red Hat has published two very interesting blogposts concerning the performance of Docker, and more specifically – the storage drivers available. They’re over 6 months old, but still relevant and mentioned in this weekends’ Fosdem talks.
Which storage driver are you using?
You can use docker info to find out.
$ docker info Containers: 21 Images: 47 ... Storage Driver: aufs Root Dir: /var/lib/docker/aufs Dirs: 89 ...
The “Storage Driver” section contains all your info. In my case, it’s using aufs because the aufs-tools package is installed. After the install, Docker will magically start to use the aufs driver for your docker containers.
Storage “Graph” Driver performance tests
Docker users can chose between devicemapper, vfs, aufs, btrfs and OverlayFS (kernel 3.18+) for their storage driver. Each having their own pro’s and con’s. So which to pick?
The Red Hat blogpost “Comprehensive Overview of Storage Scalability in Docker” has some very interesting stats on each of those drivers. I suggest having a look at it when implementing Docker in your environment.
Docker performance on RHEL 7
A month earlier, Red Hat published another blogpost on the docker performance on their RHEL7 platform. This led to a presentation they shared on Youtube.
Again, a recommendation if you’re going to give Docker a try.