Recorded run · 25 August 2026
Apple M4 Pro, macOS 26.6.2, 8 vCPU / 8 GB each
Velox 1.2.0 against Docker Desktop 4.88.0, measured on the same Mac on
the same day. Both engines ran the identical Docker Engine 29.7.2, the
same containerd image store, the same docker CLI and the
same compose plugin, with only one engine resident at a time — so
what these numbers compare is the host around the engine, not the engine.
Medians over five order-balanced rounds (three for build and compose).
Rows whose run-to-run spread was too wide to call are omitted here and
published in full, with their raw values, in the report.
| Metric | Velox | Docker Desktop | vs Docker Desktop |
|---|---|---|---|
| Install footprint | 357 MB | 2,193 MB | 6.1x smaller |
| Idle RAM, whole engine | 734 MB | 1,771 MB | 2.4x less |
| Idle RAM, after resource saver | 373 MB | 847 MB | 2.3x less |
| Idle CPU, 4 min | 0.76% | 3.52% | 4.6x less |
| RAM with 21 containers running | 1,949 MB | 2,991 MB | 1.5x less |
| Startup, restart to API-ready | 1.23 s | 1.99 s | 1.6x faster |
| Container launch | 0.11 s | 0.13 s | 1.2x faster |
| Parallel launch, 20 containers | 0.86 s | 1.01 s | 1.2x faster |
| Network, container to container | 130 Gbit/s | 96.4 Gbit/s | 1.4x faster |
| Published port, 1 stream | 43.4 Gbit/s | 12.7 Gbit/s | 3.4x faster |
| Published port, 4 streams | 59.8 Gbit/s | 25.3 Gbit/s | 2.4x faster |
| docker cp out, 1 GiB | 540 MB/s | 225 MB/s | 2.4x faster |
| docker cp in, 1 GiB | 373 MB/s | 154 MB/s | 2.4x faster |
| Disk returned after deleting ~5 GB | 5,295 MB | 3,594 MB | 1.5x more |
| VirtioFS bind-mount read, cached | 2,452 MB/s | 2,180 MB/s | on par |
| Named-volume write | 2,115 MB/s | 1,840 MB/s | on par |
| Image extraction, docker load | 6.70 s | 6.38 s | on par |
| Cold build, --no-cache | 1.60 s | 1.77 s | on par |
| Incremental build | 1.52 s | 1.56 s | on par |
| amd64 emulation tax vs native | 4.89x | 4.82x | on par |
| Postgres pgbench TPS | 13,796 | 12,372 | on par |
| Small-file extract to bind mount | 3.21 s | 2.56 s | 25% slower |
| compose down, SIGTERM-ignoring services | 10.4 s | 3.5 s | 3x slower |
Both engines were also checked functionally and came out level on every
probe run: bind mounts, host.docker.internal, TCP, UDP and
IPv6 publishing, privileged ports, BuildKit with attestations, and
linux/amd64, linux/arm/v7 and
linux/386 emulation. Velox adds
<name>.velox.local; Docker Desktop supports
per-container host-IP publishing, which Velox does not, and ships
Kubernetes, Scout, Extensions and its AI tooling, which Velox has no
equivalent for.
Read the
full report,
including the four measurement defects found and corrected while producing
it, or inspect the runnable harness in
docs/bench.