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

The latest target of our Linux benchmarking at Phoronix are running various performance benchmarks under different Docker operating system images. The images used for benchmarking were the latest of Ubuntu, Clear Linux, CentOS, Debian, and Alpine while comparing the benchmark results to running on the bare metal host.

These Docker images were all tested on the same system: Core i7 6800K, MSI X99A WORKSTATION motherboard, 16GB of DDR4 system memory, 120GB Samsung 850 EVO SSD, and NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN X graphics.

The host was running Ubuntu 16.10 with the default Linux 4.8 kernel. Docker 1.12 was running on the system via the official repository. The bare metal / native OS performance was compared to running the latest official images on Docker of docker, clearlinux, centos, debian, and alpine. Each image was carried out in a default configuration, just installing the limited necessary dependencies to get all of the benchmarks running.

All of these benchmarks were carried out in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.