I would recommend maybe even looking at iotop as well inside the containers you run to get a better idea.

They are basically doing nothing - no data is flowing thru the system and web-application is not getting any requests.

The CPU usage on the docker VM, as indicated by top command, is very small (1-3), but on host OS the process com.docker.hyperkit is consuming up to 70 CPU, causing my machine to produce excess heat and slowing down everything.

If I use VirtualBox to start Linux, allocate same resources and start containers - load on host OS is barely visible, as expected.

However, after restarting the docker and using it, the CPU load is not so high.

Both figures are without any other non-system or non-k8s containers running.

Quick benchmarks showed that hypervisor used by docker is slower (in terms of IO and CPU) than other alternatives, like virtualbox, parallels or vmware.

We have switched to docker-machine and minikube with NFS, which resulted in lower CPU usage and much nicer IO (for both local images and shared filesystems).

While this solution has more complicated setup than docker-for-mac, it also enables a big performance boost for daily docker usage (especially if combined with parallelsvmware fusion, but even virtualbox seems to be better choice than hyperkit).

No activity but constant 40-50 CPU usage for com.docker.hyperkit.

Battery draining rapidly while Docker is doing stuff, despite being connected to an 80W USB C power supply.

Constant 5 cpu usage regardless of whether any containers are running.

This is the output of my docker stats (no containers running other than the k8s ones).

Dropped to around 3 when I disabled local kubernetes cluster.

I removed almost all my mappings for shared folders except 1.

I set my cpus to 8 ram to 15gb swap to 1gb no kubernetes running I made sure that spot light was not indexing the docker.raw file under preferences I have filevault turned off under system preferences.

Im running the following containers portainer openbridgeobphp-fpm openbridgenginx redis mysql.

IO on the mac didnt seem even remotely running much very odd.

I logged into the container and ran top I noticed this The container was running a bunch of find commands every X cycles with.

Turns out its trying to run chown on every single file inside of nodemodules and vendor directories for php which is hundreds of thousands.

The cpu went from 500 to 21 and the fan shutdown like it was the end of a work day.

Any heavy container io activity will spike the cpu like a mad man.

Docker stats really doesnt translate the details of what is really happening in the container either.

Also keep in mind none of the find commands I had running were spiking cpu in the containers they just happened to be running io commands.

Docker For Mac Stable