Tim Wiederhake

Senior systems software engineer. Linux kernel, virtualization, low-level C/C++.

If your Podman containers take over two minutes to start, check your storage driver:

$ podman info --debug | grep graphDriverName
graphDriverName: vfs

If it says vfs, that is your problem. The vfs storage driver copies the entire container image on every start. No copy-on-write, no layer sharing, just a full deep copy. This apparently is the default you get, when installing podman on Debian with “recommended packages” disabled.

Install fuse-overlayfs, and run:

# WARNING! This deletes all containers, all images, all storage, everything!
$ podman system reset

Now the output changes to:

$ podman info --debug | grep graphDriverName
graphDriverName: overlay

Container startup went from 130 to 0.7 seconds, more than two orders of magnitude improvement.