It is a known issue that vboxsf (Virtualbox Shared Folders) has performance problems. This ugly fact becomes a problem if you use docker-machine with the default Virtualbox driver to mount volumes, both on Windows and OS X, especially when mounting directories with a large amount (~17k and above files). Linux does not suffer from this performance problem since it is able to run Docker natively and does not require you to run docker-machine.
There are various issues floating around Github referencing this problem, most of which remain unresolved.
- https://github.com/boot2docker/boot2docker/issues/593
- https://github.com/boot2docker/boot2docker/issues/631
- https://github.com/boot2docker/boot2docker/issues/64
- https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/9043
Unfortunately there is currently not a proper fix for the vboxsf performance issues on OS X and Windows. In fact, I reached out to the Virtualbox developers around a year ago asking what the deal was and was basically told that fixing shared folder performance was not a high priority issue for their dev team.
After hearing the unsettling news, I set out to find a good way to deal with shared volumes. I stumbled across a few different approaches to solving the problem but most of them ended up being glitchy (at the time) or overly complicated. There is a nice write up that mentions many of the tools that I tried myself.
Having tried most of the methods out there, easily the best workaround I have found is to use NFS file shares to mount the “Users” directory using a tool called docker-machine-nfs. It is easy to install and run and most importantly it just works out of the box, which is exactly what most folks are looking for.
Sadly this method does not work on Windows. And as far as I can tell there is not a good workaround to this problem if you are running docker-machine on Windows. It does sounds like some folks maybe have had some success using samba but I have not attempted to get fast volumes working on Windows so can’t say for sure what the best approach is.
To install docker-machine-nfs
curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/adlogix/docker-machine-nfs/master/docker-machine-nfs.sh | sudo tee /usr/local/bin/docker-machine-nfs > /dev/null && \ sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-machine-nfs
To run it
Make sure you already have created a docker-machine VM and verify that it is running. Then run the following command.
docker-machine-nfs <machine-name>
And that’s pretty much it… It requires admin access to do the NFS mounting so you might need to punch in your password, other than that you can pretty much follow along with what the output is doing.
There are a few caveats to be aware of.
I have noticed that on newer versions of docker-machine, if you run the script too quickly after creating the VM, docker-machine ends up having issues communicating with the Docker daemon. The work around (for now) is just to wait ~30 seconds the docker-machine VM to boot fully before running the command to mount nfs.
There is also currently an issue on the docker-machine side on version 0.5.5 and above that breaks docker-machine-nfs on the first run, which is described here. The workaround for that issue is to modify the script and place a “sleep 20” in the script, as per the comments in the issue. The author appears to have brought the issue up with docker-machine developers so should fixed properly in the near future.
