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Yet another reason your Docker containers may be slow on EC2: clock_gettime, gettimeofday and seccomp

Yet another reason your Docker containers may be slow on EC2: clock_gettime, gettimeofday and seccomp

5 years ago
Anonymous $fWzGa1uP8i

https://medium.com/appian-engineering/yet-another-reason-your-docker-containers-may-be-slow-on-ec2-clock-gettime-gettimeofday-and-9d92f6892048

Thanks to Gabriel Hollies for his help in writing this post

TL;DR: on AWS EC2 M4 instances, calls to System.nanoTime() and System.currentTimeMillis() make system calls, and these system calls are subject to even more overhead when running in Docker due to Docker’s default seccomp profile filters. The new M5 instances no longer make system calls for these time methods, so you can upgrade to newer instances if available in your region and availability zone(s). If you are stuck on 4-series instances, you could switch the clocksource to tsc as Amazon recommends in this tuning FAQ.