Re:Cloud Computing Without Containers
by marktangotango on Sunday November 11, 2018 @08:30AM
(#18426270)
My understanding is that he’s talking about app specific code, like yeah the os is smart enough to only load libc once, but php/node/python/rails/x are all going load up there language run times and app specific libraries into their processes. The non .so parts. Then the 100mb number makes sense.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
In theory (if most of the runtime code being loaded is the same files underneath) then the page cache will also help with loading them -- you get benefits from the page cache as long as you're opening the same inode (which is why I'm talking about overlayfs -- because overlayfs allows page-cache sharing for base container images).
Re:Cloud Computing Without Containers
by marktangotango on Monday November 12, 2018 @12:04PM
(#18433824)
Even then, to get significant sharing every container would need to be deploying the same frameworks, libraries, and versions, which the single process, restricted environment moots all that anyway.
I'm confused -- the article is specifically about deploying JavaScript (or something that targets WebAssembly). From where I'm standing that seems to be a fairly homogeneous thing to be deploying (if you need to have many versions of JavaScript frameworks I don't see how that's not a problem with this solution either).
"Application containers" get a bad rap because Docker's model of a bunch of tar archives with separate root filesystems isn't actually the best way of getting density (nor is it what a lot of people really want).