🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses the lack of systematic empirical investigation into how heterogeneous infrastructure affects Docker container startup latency—a critical gap that hinders performance optimization in CI/CD and serverless systems. For the first time, the container startup process is decomposed into fine-grained, quantifiable operations. Through 50 rounds of multidimensional benchmarking across three real-world heterogeneous environments—cloud SSD, cloud HDD, and macOS Docker Desktop—the work integrates key technologies including OverlayFS, Linux namespaces, volume mounts, and CPU throttling. The findings reveal several counterintuitive insights: runtime overhead dominates startup time, while image size has negligible impact (only 2.5% variation); HDDs incur 2.04× higher latency, Docker Desktop imposes a 2.69× penalty, and OverlayFS write performance degrades by two orders of magnitude. The complete toolchain and dataset are publicly released.
📝 Abstract
Container startup latency is a critical performance metric for CI/CD pipelines, serverless computing, and auto-scaling systems, yet practitioners lack empirical guidance on how infrastructure choices affect this latency. We present a systematic measurement study that decomposes Docker container startup into constituent operations across three heterogeneous infrastructure tiers: Azure Premium SSD (cloud SSD), Azure Standard HDD (cloud HDD), and macOS Docker Desktop (developer workstation with hypervisor-based virtualization). Using a reproducible benchmark suite that executes 50 iterations per test across 10 performance dimensions, we quantify previously under-characterized relationships between infrastructure configuration and container runtime behavior. Our key findings include: (1) container startup is dominated by runtime overhead rather than image size, with only 2.5% startup variation across images ranging from 5 MB to 155 MB on SSD; (2) storage tier selection imposes a 2.04x startup penalty (HDD 1157 ms vs. SSD 568 ms); (3) Docker Desktop's hypervisor layer introduces a 2.69x startup penalty and 9.5x higher CPU throttling variance compared to native Linux; (4) OverlayFS write performance collapses by up to two orders of magnitude compared to volume mounts on SSD-backed storage; and (5) Linux namespace creation contributes only 8-10 ms (<1.5%) of total startup time. All measurement scripts, raw data, and analysis tools are publicly available.