Alpine Linux Docker images have NULL for root password

Re:Alpine Linux Docker images have NULL for root password by ShinTakuya on Wednesday May 08, 2019 @10:50PM (#19864957)

As far as I'm aware you'd have to load that 80mb into memory for each docker container you run so that can add up if you want to run a bunch of containers on a cheap host with 1GB of RAM.

I do agree that people prematurely optimise and mainly incorrectly consider disk space but I think there's a decent use case for tiny images.

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Re:Alpine Linux Docker images have NULL for root password by jacques_chester on Thursday May 09, 2019 @07:14AM (#19867097)

Not quite. The 80Mb represents the uncompressed on-disk size. Those bits can appear in memory in two main ways. It can be executable, in which case large parts will be shared (remember, containers are not like VMs). Or it can in the FS cache, in which case bits will be evicted as necessary to make room for executables.

There's a case for tiny images, but it's in severely-constrained environments. Otherwise folks are fetishising the wrong thing based on a misunderstanding of how container images and runtimes work.

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