I spent close to 12 hours yesterday trying to get a fairly simple node app to run on my mac yesterday. Turned out I had to wipe out docker completely and reinstall. Keep in mind this is their stable version thats no longer in beta. I've just run into too many documented bugs for me to consider it stable. I wouldn't even say it should be out of beta.
The issues here are the real telling story: I spent close to 12 hours yesterday trying to get a fairly simple node app to run on my mac yesterday. Turned out I had to wipe out docker completely and reinstall. Keep in mind this is their stable version thats no longer in beta. I've just run into too many documented bugs for me to consider it stable. I wouldn't even say it should be out of beta.
I love docker, it's amazing when it works. It's just really not there yet. I get that their focus is on making money right now, but they need to nail their core product first. I honestly don't care about whatever cloud platform they're building if their core app doesn't even work reliably.
I'm a fan of Docker in general but I'm amazed by some of the poor choices they've made with Docker for Mac.
- Stable? That's honestly laughable. It is nowhere near stable. As an example, I was trying to upload images to a third-party image registry but the upload speed was ridiculously slow. It took me forever to figure out but it turned out I needed to completely reinstall docker for mac.
- They had a command-line tool called pinata for managing daemon settings in docker for mac. They chose to get rid of it. Not only did we lose a way to declaratively define and set configuration but the preferences window has no where near all of the daemon settings that are available.
- The CPU usage is still crazy. I regularly get 100% CPU usage on 3/4 of my CPU cores while starting up just a few containers. Even after the containers have started it will idle at 100% 1/4 cores.
- It needs to be reinstalled regularly if you are using it on a daily basis. Otherwise it will get slower and slower over time. See my first complaint.
- The GUI (kitematic) will randomly disconnect from the daemon forcing me to restart the GUI repeatedly.
- They really need some sort of garbage collector with adjustable settings. With the default settings the app will just keep building and building images and eventually fill up, crash, slow down, etc. How is that acceptable? What other apps do that?
Like I said, I like docker in general. I think they are tackling some very hard problems and definitely experiencing some growing pains from such crazy growth. However, at some point they need to take a step back and focus on the core of what they offer and make it as simple, and rock solid as possible. As another example, they still haven't added a way to compress, and/or flatten docker images. No wonder docker for mac slows down after regular use when it's building 1GB+ images for simple things.
Not 100% sure but I think there's a memory leak in hyperkit. Eventually the memory usage will grow to fill up the allocated space then docker will crash. It might be something else causing it, but that's just what I've observed.
There's also the Docker.qcow2 file ballooning in size. Only way is to do a "factory reset" or running a couple commands to clear out old images.
Not sure where the leak is, but I can confirm there is definitely one there. For me it happens whenever I restart Docker for Mac: 500+ MB of usable RAM gone. Combined with the fact that we don't reboot our Macs very often and that Docker for Mac needs frequent restarts because of hogging CPU otherwise, that's a bit of a problem.
I'd like to point out that docker or no docker, node is one of the worst languages to host applications for, custom selinux rules to get around if executing memory of the stack, memory and CPU hungry applications, npm is an absolute nightmare and you have people that don't understand programming writing 'code' they think is production worthy.
The issues here are the real telling story: I spent close to 12 hours yesterday trying to get a fairly simple node app to run on my mac yesterday. Turned out I had to wipe out docker completely and reinstall. Keep in mind this is their stable version thats no longer in beta. I've just run into too many documented bugs for me to consider it stable. I wouldn't even say it should be out of beta.
The issues here are the real telling story. https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues
I love docker, it's amazing when it works. It's just really not there yet. I get that their focus is on making money right now, but they need to nail their core product first. I honestly don't care about whatever cloud platform they're building if their core app doesn't even work reliably.