

However, it was disruptive enough, that it forced me away from Docker Desktop for Mac. The I/O performance limitation is workload-specific, primarily impacting projects with a lot of small files.


In my testing, the best build time I could achieve running Docker on macOS was 220 seconds, compared to just 9 seconds when building under Docker via a Linux virtual machine (Ubuntu Server ARM64) running on UTM. Unfortunately, the hardware was held back by the software, specifically Docker Desktop for Mac that leverages gRPC-FUSE for file sharing, which resulted in poor I/O performance. Last year, I tested Docker for Mac on the MacBook Air (M1) and MacBook Pro (M1 Max) both running Apple Silicon, which I documented across four articles.ĭocker running on Apple Silicon demonstrated tremendous potential. I have been using Docker since 2014, primarily to support web development.
