2017/05/02 by Eddie Antonio Santos, Santos, Eddie Antonio, Carson McLean +5 · 2 voices
Computer Science · Engineering · #Cloud Computing and Resource Management #Cloud computing #Computer science #Context (archaeology) #Context switch #Distributed and Parallel Computing Systems #Embedded system #Energy consumption #Engineering #Hypervisor #IoT and Edge/Fog Computing #Isolation (microbiology) #Operating system #Overhead (engineering) #Resource consumption #Virtual machine #Virtualization #cs.DC #cs.PF
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1705.01176
12 pages (minus references), 10 figures
arxiv created 2017/05/02 · openalex publication_date 2017/05/02 · arxiv updated 2017/05/04 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Context: Virtual machines provide isolation of services at the cost of hypervisors and more resource usage. This spurred the growth of systems like Docker that enable single hosts to isolate several applications, similar to VMs, within a low-overhead abstraction called containers. Motivation: Although containers tout low overhead performance, do they still have low energy consumption? Methodology: This work statistically compares (t-test, Wilcoxon) the energy consumption of three application workloads in Docker and on bare-metal Linux. Results: In all cases, there was a statistically significant (t-test and Wilcoxon p < 0.05) increase in energy consumption when running tests in Docker, mostly due to the performance of I/O system calls.