https://docs.docker.com/engine/userguide/storagedriver/image...
* On-disk, the layered approach always saves space, as expected
* In memory, it depends on which storage backend you use: apparently btrfs can't share page cache entries between containers, while aufs/overlayfs/zfs can - I'm not sure if this is due to btrfs or docker's btrfs backend.
From looking at the relevant sources, it looks like (but I could be wrong if I looked in the wrong places) both exec() and dlopen() end up mmap-ing the executable/libraries into the calling process's address space, which should mean they just reuse the page cache entries.
So, if I understand correctly, as long as you pick a filesystem which shares page cache entries between containers, then you do indeed only end up with one copy of (the read-only sections of) executables/libraries in memory, no matter how many containers are running them at once. That's good to know!
It's not something that happens automatically though because each kernel is responsible for telling the MMU how it should map memory for its child processes only. Any cross container page sharing has to be implemented at the host level where the kernel has unrestricted access to all guest memory.
One thing I wonder, and which I don't know enough about containers to answer myself, is:
Let's say I have a bunch of containers which share most of their system packages, but which each have some extra per-container state (possibly packages, possibly just application data). Suppose I decide to build one read-only image for the common data, along with one smaller, read-write overlay per container.
As I understand it, when you run multiple copies of a program on a system not using containers, read-only parts (eg, the .text sections of the executable and of any shared libraries) are only loaded into memory once. Would this behaviour carry over to multiple containers using the above setup?
If so, that seems like it would accomplish most of the memory usage reduction for this case, without needing explicit memory deduplication. Of course, this won't fit all use cases, but is it a viable option?