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How to drastically increase Docker performance on Mac and Windows

On Windows and Mac you will probably see a poor performance for your thoroughly dockerized application. This is due to very slow storage I/O operations on your mounted volumes from the local filesystem. On Mac and Windows Docker file has to route file system operations through more layers compared to running Docker on Linux.

If using docker-compose there is a very easy way to speed up the file access and the whole application. Just use the mount options delegated or cached in your docker-compose.yml file like this:

version: '2'
services:
  app:
    container_name: app
    image: php:7.3.8-fpm-stretch
    user: www-data
    working_dir: /var/www
    volumes:
      - ./:/var/www:delegated

  web:
    container_name: web
    image: nginx:1.13-alpine
    working_dir: /var/www/html
    ports:
      - "80:80"
    volumes:
      - ./:/var/www/html:ro,delegated
      - ./docker/nginx.conf:/etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf:ro

On my Mac I use the option delegated and the speedup of the application is about 140%, the runtime of PHPUnit dropped from about 4.0 minutes to 1.7!

Please read the docs for more information and consequences.