Filesystem performance on macOS 10.15

[unsignedint]

Firstly, I think this looks like a great project and it's good to see an alternative in this space!

I finally got around to testing vctl on Fusion 11.5.6 (macOS 10.15.6, MBP 2018 32GB i7-8850H) in comparison to Docker For Mac. These are some typical build times from clean for a nodejs (bucklescript, actually) project, 2 CPUs and 8GB RAM assigned to the container VM.

Native: 2s Docker for Mac (osxfs): 10s Fusion/vctl: 30s

I'm not sure if there are any tuning or filesystem-related knobs we can play with?

[mikeroySoft]

Not presently, but maybe @jeffwubj would have more insight. I know that we're doing a lot of performance-related work in the upcoming Fusion 12 release, but I'm not sure how many 'knobs' we expose...

[stackrainbow]

I'm also seeing terrible fs performance on macOS Big Sur with the latest VMware Fusion.

This seems to impact both volumes and the containers themselves, for example javascript-obfuscator, a node.js project with many dependencies takes about 8 seconds to even show the help on CLI compared to 0.2s on macOS native.

in vctl container:

root@php:/app# time /usr/local/bin/javascript-obfuscator
Usage: javascript-obfuscator <inputPath> [options]

[output omitted]

real	0m8.319s
user	0m1.328s
sys	0m0.294s

on macOS:

❯ time /usr/local/bin/javascript-obfuscator
Usage: javascript-obfuscator <inputPath> [options]

[output omitted]

/usr/local/bin/javascript-obfuscator  0.26s user 0.05s system 104% cpu 0.293 total