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2 comments

  1. Interesting post Johan. You mention just at the end that running the container takes a couple of minutes. Given that the container was built in the previous step, I’m surprised that the run takes so long. Is this a startup time (i.e. once up it runs much as you’d expect a Pi to run) or is there a noticable slowdown overall due to having docker underneath the apps inside the container?

    Thanks and keep up the good work 🙂

    Giovanni Reply

    • Good question, in short Docker is not the reason for the slow performance. A Docker container starts in milliseconds. Starting Tomcat however takes some time, on my laptop 2-3 seconds. But the Raspberry Pi is a lot slower and takes about 3 minutes (Tomcat default) to start. This can be improved, removing the standard apps from Tomcat already reduces the startup time to about 2 minutes. So the run time of the container includes starting Tomcat and the application which takes quite some time. I didn’t notice any significant overhead with Docker.

      If you’re interested in this topic you can also have a look at my latest blog. It includes a presentation from JavaOne where I gave a presentation about Docker on the Raspberry Pi.

      Johan Janssen Reply