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I am new to lxc and docker. Does docker max client count depend solely on CPU and RAM or are there some other factors associated with running multiple containers simultaneously?

mdandr
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zergood
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    LXC containers are not virtual machines. How many application instances could you run on a single server? The answer is determined by the available RAM, CPU and disk capacity. – Mark O'Connor Jun 29 '14 at 10:14
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    See [this SO Q&A](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21799382/is-there-a-maximum-number-of-containers-running-on-a-docker-host/21801470#21801470) – Ben Whaley Jun 29 '14 at 17:28

1 Answers1

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As mentioned in the comments to your question, it will largely depend on the requirements of the applications inside the containers.

What follows is anecdotal data I collected for this answer (This is on a Macbook Pro with 8 cores, 16Gb and Docker running in VirtualBox with boot2docker 2Gb, using 2 MBP cores):

I was able to launch 242 (idle) redis containers before getting:

2014/06/30 08:07:58 Error: Cannot start container c4b49372111c45ae30bb4e7edb322dbffad8b47c5fa6eafad890e8df4b347ffa: pipe2: too many open files

After that, top inside the VM reports CPU use around 30%-55% user and 10%-12% system (every redis process seems to use 0.2%). Also, I get time outs while trying to connect to a redis server.

Abel Muiño
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    Thank you for your answer, but i think you can customize the number of open files in the system. I find [here](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21799382/is-there-a-maximum-number-of-containers-running-on-a-docker-host/21801470#21801470), that you can run about 1000 containers before linux networks issues come into play. – zergood Jun 30 '14 at 14:16