Docker Benchmarks: Ubuntu, Clear Linux, CentOS, Debian & Alpine

First up with the SQLite performance it was a bit of a surprise to see the Docker images running slower than the bare metal host, since Docker is often billed as having nearly native performance especially for I/O. But only with the Clear Linux image was the performance of a Docker image close to that of the bare metal host, because Clear Linux ships with aggressive CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS by defaults and other performance optimizations to make it more competitive out-of-the-box than other distributions.

FS-Mark also showed the Docker images running slightly behind...

CompileBench goes a bit beyond pure disk I/O, but here it does show none of the Docker images performing quite as well as the bare metal host.

But at least with the Flexible I/O Tester runs, the disk I/O performance was the same across all tested configurations.