OrbStack is a fast drop-in Docker replacement for macOS
Docker on macOS has always been slow, and despite improvements on this front it is still to this day significantly slower to run a Linux container on macOS than other operating systems.
OrbStack is a macOS-native drop-in replacement for Docker (with Compose support!) I tried it out on some personal projects a few weeks ago, and immediately deleted Docker for Desktop because the performance delta was instantly noticeable. In my haste I forgot to take benchmarks; so I’ve now pulled out an old work laptop and measured the before/after running the two main Docker Compose commands. The compose build measurement below is from an empty Docker build cache, although I did pre-pull base images to mitigate the impacts of network latency:
| Command | Time (Docker) | Time (OrbStack) |
|---|---|---|
compose build | 3m44s | 3m9s (-16%) |
compose up | 1m2s | 50s (-20%) |
The exact difference will likely depend on the size of your codebase and machine specifications, but overall this is a ~17% reduction in time to build + run the repo from scratch. Not as large of a speedup as swapping from npm to pnpm, but still a very impactful change with the bonus perk of being language-agnostic. I run Docker Compose commands multiple times per day; saving a few seconds here and there adds up over the course of a year, especially when software engineers are so expensive.