This is relevant as it applies file sharing I/O pressure. It is fairly large, including over 4000 individual files and 800MB of data. The project includes a range of external dependencies and custom plugins. I plan to use LifeinTECH (this blog) as my test build, which follows the JAMstack web development architecture, using the Jekyll Static Site Generator.

64GB Unified Memory (400GB/s Memory Bandwidth).Apple M1 Max (10-core - 8 Performance / 2 Efficiency).

A summary of the specification can be found below. Test SetupĪs part of my testing, I will be using the 16-inch MacBook Pro (OCT-2021). In theory, this new feature directly targets the issue I have been experiencing, therefore I was eager to see how it performed across my common workloads. During testing with our amazing macOS community of users, we have observed that these changes have reduced the time taken to complete filesystem operations by up to 98%.” Secondly, improvements have been made to the way that files are synced between the macOS host and Docker VM. Firstly, developers now have the option of using a new experimental file sharing implementation called virtiofs (the current default is gRPC-FUSE). “The 4.6 release of Docker Desktop for Mac contains a number of changes that drastically improve file sharing performance for macOS users. During testing VirtioFS has been shown to drastically reduce the time taken to sync changes between the host and VM, leading to substantial performance improvements. Docker Desktop 4.6.0 gives macOS users the option of enabling a new experimental file-sharing technology called VirtioFS.Yesterday, Docker released Docker Desktop for Mac v4.6.0, which included the following new feature: This approach delivered an unbelievable 24x performance increase over Docker Desktop for Mac. Therefore, I have spent the past six months running Docker inside a “right-sized” Linux virtual machine, which unlocked the raw performance of the Apple Silicon by removing the filesystem I/O bottleneck. However, it was disruptive enough, that it forced me away from Docker Desktop for Mac. The I/O performance limitation is workload-specific, primarily impacting projects with a lot of small files. In my testing, the best build time I could achieve running Docker on macOS was 220 seconds, compared to just 9 seconds when building under Docker via a Linux virtual machine (Ubuntu Server ARM64) running on UTM. Unfortunately, the hardware was held back by the software, specifically Docker Desktop for Mac that leverages gRPC-FUSE for file sharing, which resulted in poor I/O performance. Last year, I tested Docker for Mac on the MacBook Air (M1) and MacBook Pro (M1 Max) both running Apple Silicon, which I documented across four articles.ĭocker running on Apple Silicon demonstrated tremendous potential. I have been using Docker since 2014, primarily to support web development.

Docker m1 qemu