Performance issues running nginx in a docker container

Question

I'm using ApacheBench (ab) to measure the performance of two nginx on Linux. They have same config file. The Only difference is one of nginx is running in a docker container.

Nginx on Host System:

Running: ab -n 50000 -c 1000 http://172.17.0.2:7082/

Concurrency Level:      1000
Time taken for tests:   9.376 seconds
Complete requests:      50000
Failed requests:        0
Total transferred:      8050000 bytes
HTML transferred:       250000 bytes
Requests per second:    5332.94 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       187.514 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       0.188 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          838.48 [Kbytes/sec] received

Nginx in docker container:

Running: ab -n 50000 -c 1000 http://172.17.0.2:6066/

Concurrency Level:      1000
Time taken for tests:   31.274 seconds
Complete requests:      50000
Failed requests:        0
Total transferred:      8050000 bytes
HTML transferred:       250000 bytes
Requests per second:    1598.76 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       625.484 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       0.625 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          251.37 [Kbytes/sec] received

Just wondering why the container one has such a poor performance

nginx.conf:

worker_processes  auto;
worker_rlimit_nofile 10240;

events {
    use epoll;
    multi_accept on;
    worker_connections  4096;
}

http {
    include       mime.types;
    default_type  application/octet-stream;

    sendfile        on;
    keepalive_timeout  10;

    client_header_timeout 10;
    client_body_timeout 10;

    send_timeout 10;

    tcp_nopush on;
    tcp_nodelay on;

    server {
        listen       80;
        server_name  localhost;
        location / {
            return 200 'hello';
        }

        error_page   500 502 503 504  /50x.html;
        location = /50x.html {
            root   html;
        }
    }
}

Answer 1

I'd like to add to @Andrian Mouat's answer, something I've just found in the docs.

It is written in the Docker run reference:

NETWORK: HOST

Compared to the default bridge mode, the host mode gives significantly better networking performance since it uses the host’s native networking stack whereas the bridge has to go through one level of virtualization through the docker daemon.

It is recommended to run containers in this mode when their networking performance is critical, for example, a production Load Balancer or a High Performance Web Server.

---

Some tests with Flame Graphs follow:

When using the host’s native networking stack with --net=host, there are fewer system calls and this is clearly depicted in the following Flame Graphs. Details:

• system wide captures for 30sec: sudo perf record -F 99 -a -g -- sleep 30
• ab test from another physical machine: ab -n 50000 -c 1000 http://my-host-ip/ (takes place while capturing)

For more info on Flame Graphs, check Brendan Gregg's website: www.brendangregg.com/

Flame Graph when publishing port -p 80:80:

Full picture here

Zoomed to nginx part:

Flame Graph when using --net=host:

Full picture here

Zoomed to nginx part:

Answer 2

How are you running the container? Is it using the default Docker bridge network? If so, try running the tests with --net=host and see what the results look like.