REDB: Real-time enhancement of Docker containers via memory bank partitioning in multicore systems

Abstract

Docker is a lightweight virtualization technology adopted by numerous companies to develop, deploy, and manage applications. However, All Docker containers running on the same system share system resources, leading to performance interference among them. This interference adversely affects the predictability of program response times within the containers. Thus, shared resource isolation between containers has become an important issue. Efforts have been made to improve isolation across various dimensions, such as file systems, I/O, etc. However, consideration of the effect of memory bank interference remains open. We propose a novel approach, REDB, as an effective solution to achieve memory isolation among containers, thereby enhancing the real-time performance of Docker containers. The fundamental strategy is partitioning DRAM banks and allocating specific banks to particular containers. The results reveal that the slowdown ratios of SPEC CPU2006 benchmarks show an average improvement of 7.7% (up to 18.4%) for Docker with REDB. We utilize the Cyclictest tool to characterize the Docker container latency, and our evaluations indicate that the maximum latency, a critical indicator of real-time performance, decreases significantly from 564 us for Docker without bank partitioning to just 26 us for Docker with REDB, resulting in an impressive reduction of 95.3%.