There have been a litany of bugs and long running issues in docker for Mac causing high CPU usage. It is worth checking out the issues to see if one of the fixes works for you. Many of them relate to how volumes are mounted. I finally settled on a config and this is a non-issue. Of course, having to do this for any piece of infra is terrible, but docker is such a lingua franca on the server side that its worth it in this case.