An Empirical Study of Container Image Configurations and Their Impact on Start Times

A core selling point of application containers is their fast start times compared to other virtualization approaches like virtual machines. Predictable and fast container start times are crucial for improving and guaranteeing the performance of containerized cloud, serverless, and edge applications. While previous work has investigated container starts, there remains a lack of understanding of how start times may vary across container configurations. We address this shortcoming by presenting and analyzing a dataset of approximately 200,000 open-source Docker Hub images featuring different image configurations (e.g., image size and exposed ports). Leveraging this dataset, we investigate the start times of containers in two environments and identify the most influential features. Our experiments show that container start times can vary between hundreds of milliseconds and tens of seconds in the same environment. Moreover, we conclude that no single dominant configuration feature determines a container's start time, and hardware and software parameters must be considered together for an accurate assessment.