At the end of DockerCon 2015, Dieter Reuter from Hypriot presented a demo running 500 Docker containers on a Raspberry Pi 2 device but he knew that number could be at least doubled.
TL;DR Dieter was right.
A big congratulations to Damien Duportal, Nicolas de Loof and Yoann Dubreuil on running 2500 web servers in Docker containers on a single Raspberry Pi 2!
Damien, Nicolas and Yoann each win a complimentary pass to DockerCon EU 2015 and speaking slot during the conference to demo how they accomplished this.
#RpiDocker 2740 web servers running on a #Rpi, could have more. But using a patched docker daemon with a hack that isn’t a valuable fix.
— Nicolas De loof (@ndeloof) October 13, 2015
Nicolas de Loof explains more:
To be honest this 2740 web servers score is not strictly eligible for this challenge. We built a custom Docker daemon with some hack-ish `debug.setMaxThread` to bypass Go 1.4 limitation, which didn’t allow us to run more than 10000 threads for 2500 containers. A valuable fix would require understanding why the daemon needs so many threads (4 per container – maybe using Non Blocking IO multiplexing?). This is definitely not something I can contribute with my “hello-world” level Golang skills 🙂
It was really interesting for us to find such a limit, understand it and get a bit further to discover the next one! Adhering to the challenge rules, we ran 2499 containers. Nobody could run more with the current Docker design, so this opens up an interesting discussion of future Docker improvements!
Regardless, 2500 web servers on a RPi, is such a crazy metric!
We think so too and we’re excited to have all three winners join us at DockerCon EU 2015 to present how they were able to achieve this! Can’t wait for DockerCon EU 2015? Dieter will join Damien and Yoann for an online meetup this Thursday, Oct. 22 to share their hacks.
Join us on Thursday at 10:00 PDT/19:00 CEST for Docker Online Meetup #27: Raspberry Pi DockerCon Challenge
During the meetup, the winners will present how they were able to get 2,500 web servers in Docker containers running on a single Raspberry Pi device. There will be time for Q&A at the end.
Can you replicate Damien, Nicolas and Yoann’s record?
Check out this update from September when Damien Duportal held the record with 2334 containers on a Raspberry Pi device.
You can also see Dieter’s original demo here:
https://youtu.be/MHJmNZSRve0?t=1m48s
For more information on how to get started with Docker and Hypriot on Raspberry Pi, check out this short list of resources:
• Getting started with our Docker Hypriot SD-card image on Raspberry Pi
• Raspberry Pi Docker Image for HTTPd
• Start-Script for running lots of containers on the Raspberry Pi
Learn More about Docker
• New to Docker? Try our 10 min online tutorial
• Share images, automate builds, and more with a free Docker Hub account
• Read the Docker 1.8 Release Notes
• Subscribe to Docker Weekly
• Register for upcoming Docker Online Meetups
• Attend upcoming Docker Meetups
• Register for DockerCon Europe 2015
• Start contributing to Docker
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