[chef] Re: Kitchen-Docker Much Slower than Kitchen-Vagrant

[Charles Johnson < >]

There’s some caveats with kitchen-docker. When the cache is cold, things are slow. Once it’s warmed up, things tend to be really fast. In my experience, the first run with kitchen-docker is about the same speed or a bit slower than an equivalent Vagrant run.

Also, you can’t do your first kitchen run in parallel with a cold boot2docker. The disk usage in the vm tends to increase faster than the guest-disk-auto-resize in virtualbox can manage, and my runs fail as a result. Serialize the first time through.

All that said, subsequent runs are much, much faster and parallelize no problem.

My setup:

• Retina MBP Mid–2012 (Core i7 16GB RAM)
• OSX 10.10.2
• boot2docker 1.5.0 (from brew cask)
• docker 1.5.0 (from brew cask)
• chefdk 0.4.0
• VMWare Fusion 7.1.1
• Vagrant 1.7.2
• vagrant-vmware-fusion (3.2.0)
• Have my vagrant box already cached

Here’s a repo with a very simple recipe, just one template and an attribute feature flag. The repo contains a .kitchen.yml that does 3 suites: https://github.com/charlesjohnson/fundamentals-with-tests/blob/master/chef-repo/cookbooks/motd/.kitchen.yml

Here’s my .kitchen.local.yml that I layer in on top of it:

driver_plugin: docker
driver_config:
  provision_command: curl -L https://www.opscode.com/chef/install.sh | bash
  require_chef_omnibus: false
  use_sudo: false

Turning off the require_chef_omnibus flag and manually curl-pipe-bash’ing puts the installation of chef-client into its own layer in the docker cache. Slow the first time, zippy as hell afterward.

Here’s some quick informal benchmarks for those runs, just doing a kitchen destroy; kitchen converge (no busser):

Kitchen-Docker (cold booted VM, no layers cached at all, no parallel):
-----> Kitchen is finished. (2m38.15s)

Kitchen-Docker (warm cache, no parallel): -----> Kitchen is finished. (0m22.73s)

Kitchen-Docker (warm cache, parallel): -----> Kitchen is finished. (0m7.02s)

So by using kitchen-docker I get 8-second kitchen runs, including machine creation from scratch each time. Not bad at all.

Thanks,

    --Charles

Charles Johnson — Product Engineer

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On April 4, 2015 at 7:47:45 AM, Jimmy Huang ( "> ) wrote:

Hi,

I am trying out kitchen-docker as a replacement for kitchen-vagrant, hoping to speed up my integration tests.  Unfortunately, the tests take ten times as long to run with kitchen-docker compared to kitchen vagrant.  I am on test-kitchen 1.3.1 and kitchen-docker 1.7.0.  Below is my .kitchen.yml.  I used Boot2Docker to install Docker and Vagrant on my machine.  Thank you for your help.

Jimmy

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox?compose=14c84e4a519b2984

---

driver:

name: docker

 

provisioner:

name: chef_zero

data_bags_path: test/fixtures/data_bags

environments_path: test/fixtures/environments

 

platforms:

- name: ubuntu-14.04

driver_config:

image: ubuntu:14.04

container_name: ubuntu_test_1404

platform: ubuntu

attributes:

 

suites:

- name: stag

provisioner:

client_rb:

environment: masterwrap-stag

run_list:

- recipe[masterwrap::default]

attributes: