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How We Solved a Report on docker-compose Performance on macOS Catalina

As a Docker Compose maintainer, my daily duty is to check for newly reported issues and try to help users through misunderstanding and possible underlying bugs. Sometimes issues are very well documented, sometimes they are nothing much but some “please help” message. And sometimes they look really weird and can result in funny investigations. Here is the story of how we solved one such report…

A one-line bug report

An issue was reported as “docker-compose super slow on macOS Catalina” – no version, no details. How should I prioritize this? I don’t even know if the reporter is using the latest version of the tool – the opened issue doesn’t follow the bug reporting template. This is just a one-liner. But for some reason, I decided to take a look at it anyway and diagnose the issue.

Without any obvious explanation for super-slowness, I decided to take a risk and upgrade my own MacBook to OSX Catalina. I was able to reproduce significant slow down in docker-compose execution, waiting seconds for the very first line printed on the console even to display usage on invalid command.

Investigating the issue

In the meantime, some Continue reading