[lxc-users] Speeding up containers startup

[Benoit Lourdelet]

Hello,

I am running thousands of containers  (1.0.0 beta2 kernel 3.11.9)  - each with one physical interface-
 and suffering from relatively slow startup rate : it takes 30 minutes to start 5000 containers.

During the startup period,  the CPU is not busy (below 20%). There is no disk involved as I run on a RAM disk.

I know that transferring interfaces to a namespace takes time.

The following script takes 24 minutes on the same platform :


date

for i in $(seq 1 5000)

 do

ip netns add sp$i

ip link add a$i type veth peer name b$i

ip link set a$i netns sp$i

done

Date


Starting 5000 containers without interface (only lo0) takes 11 minutes. So adding 24 to 11 is approximatively 30 minutes.

Is there a way to start the containers without interface  at all and add the interfaces to the containers in a  bulk fashion to speed up the processes ?

More generally is there a reason why container creation is not eating all the CPU ? The container creation processes takes between 10 or 20% of the host core CPU and no more.
Taking in account that no disk is involved as I run on a RAM disk.

Thanks

Benoit
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