Memory and CPU constraints inside a Docker Container

In one of the previous blog posts we wrote about different configuration options for our Docker image. Now we did another step adding auto-configuration steps for memory and CPU constraints.

Before we dig in...

Setting memory and CPU constraints to containers is very popular technique especially for public cloud offerings (such as OpenShift). Behind the scenes everything works based on adding additional Docker settings to the containers. There are two very popular switches: --memory (which is responsible for setting the amount of available memory) and --cpu-quota (which throttles CPU usage).

Now here comes the best part... JDK has no idea about those settings! We will probably need to wait until JDK9 for getting full CGroups support.

What can we do about it?

The answer is very simple, we need to tell JDK what is the available memory (at least by setting Xmx) and available number of CPUs (by setting XX:ParallelGCThreads, XX:ConcGCThreads and Djava.util.concurrent.ForkJoinPool.common.parallelism).

And we have some very good news! We already did it for you!

Let's test it out!

At first you need to pull our latest Docker image:

Then run it with CPU and memory limits using the following command:

Note that JAVA_OPTS variable was overridden. Let's have a look what had happened:

• -Xms64m -Xmx350m - it is always a good idea to set Xmn inside a Docker container. Next we set Xmx to 70% of available memory. 
• -XX:ParallelGCThreads=6 -XX:ConcGCThreads=6 -Djava.util.concurrent.ForkJoinPool.common.parallelism=6 - The next thing is setting CPU throttling as I explained above.

There might be some cases where you wouldn't like to set those properties automatically. In that case, just pass -n switch to the starter script:

More reading

If this topic sounds interesting to you, do not forget to have a look at those links:

• A great series of articles about memory and CPU in the containers by Andrew Dinn [1][2]
• A practical implementation by Fabric8 Team [3]
• A great article about memory limits by Rafael Benevides [4]
• OpenShift guidelines for creating Docker images [5]