Open Access Open Access  Restricted Access Subscription Access

Cross-Platform Performance Evaluation of a Docker Compose–Based Web Application

Bhargav P, Gajanan M Naik

Abstract


Containerization has changed the way most developers build web apps. Instead of dealing with configuration headaches, you can package everything your app needs into a single and portable container. Docker is like a toolkit to keep everything isolated and reproducible, while Docker Compose lets you spin up several services with one simple file. In our experiment, we set up a two-tier web app and ran it on different operating systems. We found that Linux hosts delivered snappier performance for CPU and disk writes—probably thanks to direct kernel access. Windows and macOS were a bit slower due to virtualization layers. Still, Docker Compose made managing all the moving parts a breeze, and apps ran reliably on every platform we tested.


Full Text:

PDF

References


J. Turnbull, The Docker Book: Containerization is the New Virtualization. James Turnbull, 2014.

M. Merkel, “Docker: Lightweight Linux containers for consistent development and deployment,” Linux Journal, vol. 2014, no. 239, pp. 1–12, Mar. 2014.

K. Boettiger, “An introduction to Docker for reproducible research,” ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, vol. 49, no. 1, pp. 71–79, Jan. 2015.

A. Morabito, V. Di Valerio, and O. Morabito, “Evaluating performance of Docker containers for HPC applications,” Proc. IEEE Cloud Computing Conf., pp. 1–8, 2018.

M. Peinl, F. Holzschuher, and F. Pfitzer, “Docker cluster orchestration with Swarm, Kubernetes, and Mesos,” Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Cloud Computing and Services Science (CLOSER), pp. 813–820, 2016.

Docker Inc., “Docker Documentation: Overview of Docker Compose,” Available: https://docs.docker.com/compose/, accessed Oct. 2025.

J. Thönes, “Microservices,” IEEE Software, vol. 32, no. 1, pp. 116–116, Jan.–Feb. 2015.

B. Sharma, S. Chaurasiya, and R. Patel, “Performance analysis of Docker containers on different operating systems,” Int. J. of Computer Applications, vol. 183, no. 22, pp. 25–30, 2021.


Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.