Over at the developer experience working group and at 2U, we have discovered OrbStack, a more-performant drop-in replacement for Docker Desktop on Macs. We’ve seen success within 2U/edx.org and getting it to work with devstack, but we’d love to get wider feedback on how well it works as a replacement, especially as to how well it works with Tutor.
Caveats: This project is not open source, and there are plans to make it paid in the future. We feel like this is still a decent trade-off since Docker Desktop isn’t free either.
If folks have time to do some experimentation and leave some feedback in this thread, the DevEx WG would be most grateful. And hey, maybe your Mac will be happier, too.
I have used it for local testing across lms/studio/frontend-app-learning/authoring and it was a drop in replacement with no drama whatsoever.
Except that I can switch from my running stack to working in my IDE and back without a four second pause. And sometimes forget the stack is running. And it dev.stops cleanly instead of requiring three tries.
The only drawback is that docker desktop had a convenient log viewer built in. The make dev.logs targets are a good enough substitute.
On my few year old intel mac I gave both 12GB of memory. When I run devstack on both, orbstack seems a lot faster, maybe as much as twice as fast for things like stopping and restarting the LMS. Orbstack also does not make every thing else on my machine come to a crashing halt even during dev.up.lms which I can’t say is true for docker.
I hear docker is considerably less horrible on linux, but that’s not what I’ve got here.
So you are using intel/Mac, so we can elminate the (virtualization: to be the cause, which is true for Apple silicon). That being said, would try with the latest Docker engine, what does docker --verison gets you?
Regarding my case I am running docker engine Docker version 20.10.17, build 100c701, on Mac M2, and it’s quite good, though I use tutor not devstack.