18 ms·

What is the obsession with smaller images? If you are running out of disk space before CPU, RAM, IOPS, network, well there is a cheap fix for that.

influx 9y ago
Folks using virtual machines and containers trying to minimize bloat.
geofft 9y ago
Containerization - taking a deployment that previously was made of lots of apps running on one OS on one physical machine (or a relatively generous fraction of one, as a VM), and turning it into lots of apps each running on their OS on top of the same amount of machine. Containerization significantly increases disk usage for each container and probably increases RAM use a little bit, but to first order does not affect CPU or IOPS or network.
- revelation 9y ago
  I understand it is about containers. But no disk space of the world is worth your container app crashing because someone wanted to save a few megabytes by ditching glibc or otherwise just pushing more work into each and every individual container. It's Java Enterprise all over, who cares it's always allocating tens of GiB of RAM, you have to get to the point of buying a lot of it before it makes an hour of an engineers time worthwhile.
semiquaver 9y ago
Docker. The size of your base image directly affects the size of application images that use it as a base layer.
fmntf 9y ago
Embedded systems. Smaller images take less time to be written on SD/eMMC devices.
- revelation 9y ago
  yocto and buildroot have that market truly locked down because there are a lot of requirements beyond just size.
ggm 9y ago
less moving parts means less to consider for risks and bugs. and all the other reasons people say small, like faster to load, upload, distribute into container models
hamandcheese 9y ago
Well, expanding disk space can be pretty disruptive even if it is cheap. No need to be wasteful.
lovelearning 9y ago
I prefer less disk usage because they enable faster and more frequent backups, and quicker uploads to remote backup. I'm not really running out of free space but I still prefer reducing disk usage. Second reason is that I can't fit more than two hard disks in my laptop, and more than 4 in my desktop. Third reason is that internal or external hard disks are not exactly cheap in my country. My country sees ridiculously high import duties and retail markup on all electronics.
kondro 9y ago
Less stuff in an image means a smaller surface for bugs and security exploits.

influx 9y ago

Folks using virtual machines and containers trying to minimize bloat.

geofft 9y ago

Containerization - taking a deployment that previously was made of lots of apps running on one OS on one physical machine (or a relatively generous fraction of one, as a VM), and turning it into lots of apps each running on their OS on top of the same amount of machine. Containerization significantly increases disk usage for each container and probably increases RAM use a little bit, but to first order does not affect CPU or IOPS or network.

revelation 9y ago
I understand it is about containers. But no disk space of the world is worth your container app crashing because someone wanted to save a few megabytes by ditching glibc or otherwise just pushing more work into each and every individual container. It's Java Enterprise all over, who cares it's always allocating tens of GiB of RAM, you have to get to the point of buying a lot of it before it makes an hour of an engineers time worthwhile.

semiquaver 9y ago

Docker. The size of your base image directly affects the size of application images that use it as a base layer.

fmntf 9y ago

Embedded systems. Smaller images take less time to be written on SD/eMMC devices.

revelation 9y ago
yocto and buildroot have that market truly locked down because there are a lot of requirements beyond just size.

ggm 9y ago

less moving parts means less to consider for risks and bugs. and all the other reasons people say small, like faster to load, upload, distribute into container models

hamandcheese 9y ago

Well, expanding disk space can be pretty disruptive even if it is cheap. No need to be wasteful.

lovelearning 9y ago

I prefer less disk usage because they enable faster and more frequent backups, and quicker uploads to remote backup. I'm not really running out of free space but I still prefer reducing disk usage. Second reason is that I can't fit more than two hard disks in my laptop, and more than 4 in my desktop. Third reason is that internal or external hard disks are not exactly cheap in my country. My country sees ridiculously high import duties and retail markup on all electronics.

kondro 9y ago

Less stuff in an image means a smaller surface for bugs and security exploits.