My dev containers are slow, how can I make them faster?

Remote Development Environments
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My app builds slower in a dev container than in my laptop, what can I do?

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The performance of dev containers is a crucial part of the Okteto developer experience. To enhance the speed of your dev containers, we recommend adhering to several best practices:

  • Optimize the files synchronized to your dev container via the .stignore file
  • Configure persistency for your programming language and framework caches
  • Configure CPU/Memory resources for your dev containers
  • Configure faster storage for your dev containers

Optimize the files synchronized to your dev container via the .stignore file

When you execute okteto up, Okteto synchronizes your local file system to your remote dev container. This operation can be optimized in several ways:

  • If your dev image comes with your code, the synchronization will be faster because Okteto detects your local files are already available in the remote dev container
  • Ignore files you don’t need for development, like documentation images or build artifacts. In particular, always ignore your .git folder. It’s not only a fat folder, but it also introduces bad behaviors in the synchronization protocol
  • Build your dependencies on remote. For example, don’t sync node_modules. You can generate node_modules on remote and avoid the synchronization of thousands on files.

Configure persistency for your programming language and framework caches

Most programming languages and frameworks come with cache folders to optimize the subsequent builds of your application. You can persist these folders using the volumes section of the Okteto Manifest. You can check some of our samples for different programming languages:

Follow this link for a list of the cache folders used by other programming languages and frameworks.

Configure CPU/Memory resources for your dev containers

During the Okteto installation, you can configure the default CPU and memory resources allocated for every container deployed to Okteto using quotas. The default values for every container are:

  resources:
    requests:
      cpu: 100m
      memory: 0.2Gi
    limits:
      cpu: 2
      memory: 8Gi

At deployment time, you can configure your own resources for your pods in your Kubernetes manifests or Docker Compose file. You can also configure the resources of your dev containers in the resources section of your Okteto Manifest.

Note that the performance of your dev containers can be significantly influenced by the type of processor it runs on. Different virtual machines (VMs) may have processors with varying capabilities. If you are running Okteto Self-hosted, you can enhance performance by configuring your dev containers to run on a dedicated node pool with a high-speed processor. You can do this for every dev container using tolerations or nodeSelectors in your Okteto Manifest:

tolerations:
  - key: nvidia.com/gpu
    operator: Exists
nodeSelector:
  disktype: ssd

You can also configure this behavior for all your dev containers across the board using the field affinities upPool in your Okteto helm values file. For example, like this:

affinity:
  required: true
  upPool:
    requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution:
      nodeSelectorTerms:
      - matchExpressions:
        - key: okteto-pool-type
          operator: In
          values:
          - dev-containers

Configure faster storage for your dev containers

In Okteto Self-hosted, another configuration setting that can significantly boost the performance of your dev containers is the choice of storage associated with the Persistent Volume created by okteto up. Dev containers are usually I/O intensive, and opting for SSDs over standard disks can substantially impact build performance. You can configure the storage class of your dev container using the field persistentVolume.storageClass in your Okteto Manifest:

persistentVolume:
  enabled: true
  storageClass: ssd
  size: 30Gi

You can also configure this behavior for all your dev containers across the board using the field devStorageClass in your Okteto helm values file:

devStorageClass:
  enabled: true
  storageClass: ebs-sc

Beta Feature! Hybrid Mode

There are some scenarios where building and running your application locally is faster than using a remote dev container. Or when code sync can introduce friction points like the impossibility of syncing the .git folder to your remote dev container.

We have developed the hybrid mode for okteto up for these scenarios. When using hybrid mode, you can run one of your application’s services locally but make it accessible to other services running in the cluster and vice-versa.

Follow the link for more information about hybrid mode.