Windows 10 docker-compose takes 100% disk usage

Question

Docker is very slow on windows 10. I followed a lot of the tasks to make the index not run on the folder and tried to speed things up. The process appears to take up 100% of the CPU, which is fine, but also 100%+ of the disk IO and that is a huge bottleneck. Tasks that take less than 10 seconds to run on linux or mac are taking upwards of 40 minutes to complete on windows.

This is simply not usable in any meaningful way. Is there a reason why docker-compose insists on writing 150MB/s to disk rather than using ram? I have tons of ram. I could actually store the entire docker-container system in ram and have about 10GB left over.

BTW, while it is feasible to insist that docker only run on Linux for servers, development has to support windows, linux, and mac. I cannot believe that testing did not reveal windows 10 support dearly lacking and no, turning off anti-virus is absolutely not an option. Many docker developers do not have the proper permissions to do so and recommending that docker users disable anti-virus is an incredible request. Also, disabling anti-virus or the like still does not answer why docker takes up 100% of disk IO.

Answer 1

I know this is an older thread, but I wanted to post with the hope of helping someone in the future. I managed to solve my problem with 100% disk utilization with Docker Desktop and WSL2. The solution was 2-fold. First, I disabled the "Windows Search" indexing service. This helped quite a bit but didn't entirely solve the problem. The second thing is that I disabled Windows Defender (antivirus) real-time-scan (which you can find under Settings). With both of these disabled, my disk utilization dropped from 100% to around 4% with docker desktop running 3 containers. Disabling antivirus scanning is risky, but in my case, the pros outweighed the cons.

Answer 2

I had this same issue with the recent update to 3.0.0 of Docker Desktop for Windows using Hyper-V.

The solution for me was to increase the resources made available to the VM (Settings -> Resources -> Advanced). I increased the number of CPUs (from 2 to 4), Memory (1GB to 6GB), Swap (1GB to 2GB) and Disk Space (64GB to 128GB). And I have not had the 100% disk usage problem since.

Answer 3

I have experienced this problem on Windows 10 with the following conditions:

1. Start a Jenkins container.
2. Setup a Maven build for a project from a Git repository on Jenkins.
3. Run the build.

Build completes just fine.

3. Start a second container with Sonarqube.
4. Add step to Jenkins to perform Sonar analysis and run the build.

The Jenkins build hangs after some time, disk usage 99-100%, CPU is fine. Docker doesn't respond to any console commands.

Had to restart Docker to fix this.

Answer 4

So recently I was having the same issue. I was using Docker with DDEV for a Drupal development environment. Running composer require drupal/something took many many hours to complete. I tried some of the trouble shooting items on Why is PHP Composer so slow?. Specifically, running and using composer global require hirak/prestissimo. At least this actually ran. It was promising. It however did not fix the issue. I tried uninstalling an reinstalling DDEV and Docker as suggested by Spiceworks: Docker for windows reach 100% disk usage after win 10 in-place update. This also did not work. I decided to try ddev composer install outside of the container instead of composer install inside the container. Composer gave me the error: This host computer is unable to create real symlinks, please see the docs to enable developer mode: Turned on windows development mode and composer started to work as it should.

Solution: Turn on windows developer mode so system links can be used.

Hope this helps y'all!