I recently moved Nextcloud and Gitea from Containers on a Debian VM to Alpine LXCs running Alpine’s packages. I’ve never had Nextcloud’s web interface so snappy and my resource usage for both is next to 0.
If you’re running Proxmox I’d highly recommend trying out Alpine LXCs if they package your services.
I’ve found the idea of LXC containers to be better than they are in practice. I’ve migrated all of my servers to Proxmox and have been trying to move various services from VMs to LXC containers and it’s been such a hassle. You should be able to directly forward disk block devices, but just could not get them to mount for an MinIO array - ended up just setting their entire contents to 100000:100000 and mounting them on the host and forwarding the mount point instead. Never managed to CAP_IPC_LOCK to work correctly for a HashiCorp Vault install. Docker in LXC has some serious pain points and feels very fragile.
It’s damning that every time I have a problem with LXC the first search result will be a Proxmox forum topic with a Proxmox employee replying to the effect of “we recommend VMs over LXC for this use case” - Proxmox doesn’t seem to recommend LXC for anything. Proxmox + LXC is definitely better than CentOS + Podman, but my heart longs for the sheer competence of FreeBSD Jails.
I’ve had relatively good luck with docker in containers but eventually decided to run docker in VMs as I only semi trust most docker apps and like the added security I get from having it in a full VM in full isolation. Some of the workarounds for docker in LXCs are far from security best practices.
I’ve played with both Alpine and Debian in LXC, launched multiple services in both at the same time, and, honestly, did not notice any advantages in RAM or CPU consumption. Debian LXC uses slightly more disk, but this is trivial for me
Alpine packages services like Gitea and Nextcloud which Debian does not. This makes keeping up to date alot simpler for myself but that’s personal preference.
As pointed out, the DNS issue was fixed, and the other point made about Python wheels has also been addressed; quite a good chunk of packages on PyPi have had a musl wheel added in the past 6 months or so, including numpy & scipy. I’m also not certain if the Go part is true; probably somewhere around half of the Go apps I’m running as a container are running or were built on an Alpine base.
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I’ve found the idea of LXC containers to be better than they are in practice. I’ve migrated all of my servers to Proxmox and have been trying to move various services from VMs to LXC containers and it’s been such a hassle. You should be able to directly forward disk block devices, but just could not get them to mount for an MinIO array - ended up just setting their entire contents to 100000:100000 and mounting them on the host and forwarding the mount point instead. Never managed to CAP_IPC_LOCK to work correctly for a HashiCorp Vault install. Docker in LXC has some serious pain points and feels very fragile.
It’s damning that every time I have a problem with LXC the first search result will be a Proxmox forum topic with a Proxmox employee replying to the effect of “we recommend VMs over LXC for this use case” - Proxmox doesn’t seem to recommend LXC for anything. Proxmox + LXC is definitely better than CentOS + Podman, but my heart longs for the sheer competence of FreeBSD Jails.
I’ve had relatively good luck with docker in containers but eventually decided to run docker in VMs as I only semi trust most docker apps and like the added security I get from having it in a full VM in full isolation. Some of the workarounds for docker in LXCs are far from security best practices.
Even Debian LXC are under 100meg of ram! I love LXC, it just feels good to use them.
I’ve played with both Alpine and Debian in LXC, launched multiple services in both at the same time, and, honestly, did not notice any advantages in RAM or CPU consumption. Debian LXC uses slightly more disk, but this is trivial for me
Alpine packages services like Gitea and Nextcloud which Debian does not. This makes keeping up to date alot simpler for myself but that’s personal preference.
FYI
As pointed out, the DNS issue was fixed, and the other point made about Python wheels has also been addressed; quite a good chunk of packages on PyPi have had a musl wheel added in the past 6 months or so, including numpy & scipy. I’m also not certain if the Go part is true; probably somewhere around half of the Go apps I’m running as a container are running or were built on an Alpine base.