Why Docker commands are slow when running them on window machine?

Why Docker commands are slow when running them on window machine?

Common Facts

It's very common incident to have a bad impression about docker while using it on windows system. The main reason of the frustration is actually it seems working pretty slow. 😣

What I found ?

While using docker on windows, It's obvious to use Docker Desktop App . It's really a great GUI having all options to look into multiple containers, maintain them, watching logs etc.

List plus running compose.png

  • Docker Desktop on windows runs on top of WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) which is a layer between Windows and Linux. 🤔

  • If you check the task manager while running the app you'll find Docker Desktop WSL backend is taking a huge amount of physical and logical resources to run.

What's making it slow?

Windows requirements of Docker App on WSL system works well. But - WSL uses the 9P protocol to access Windows drives, and it is currently known to be very slow when compared to:

  • Native NTFS (obviously)
  • The ext4 filesystem on the virtual disk used by WSL2
  • And even the performance of WSL1 with Windows drives

So the communication between Windows and Linux through WSL during Hard Drive Operations can be quite slow.

Possible Solution

  • The most silly solutions is switch to Linux. It's really fun. 😀

linux.png

  • Or start Docker directly from Ubuntu or any Linux in Windows. So that the interpretation problem between those two systems is reduced.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading the article. 🤗 This is my first writing on this blog. Tried hard to make some sense out of all information. Hope it's worth it. If it is, you can BUY ME A COFFEE & Find me some places - Link Tree

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