March 2019 Archives

I recently noticed that something was using up lots of RAM on my Mac, as it would periodically slow down. I had some suspects, but rather than regularly checking in Activity Monitor, I thought it would be more helpful if I had a way to monitor usage of RAM by various processes over time.

Due to previous success with my Splunk Lab app, I decided to use it as the basis for building out a RAM monitoring app. The data acquisition part, however, was trickier. The output of the UNIX ps app isn’t very structured, and I had some problems parsing that data, especially in situations where there were spaces in filenames and arguments to those commands.

So I wrote a replacement for PS. It turns out that Python has a module called psutil, which lets you programmatically examine the process tree on your Mac. I ended up writing an app called Better PS, and it writes highly structured data on each current process to disk, which is then ingested by Splunk.

I’ve written about Docker before, as I am a big fan of it. And for this post, I’m going to talk about some practical situations in which I’ve used Docker in real life, both for testing and software development!

But first, let’s recap what Docker IS and IS NOT:

Docker containers DO spin up quickly (1-2 seconds or less)
Docker containers DO have separated process tress and filesystems
Docker containers ARE NOT virtual machines
Docker containers ARE intended to be ephemeral. (short-lived)
You CAN, however, mount filesystems from the host machine into Docker, so those files can live on after the container shuts down (or is killed).
You SHOULD only run one service per Docker container.

Everybody got that? Good. Now, let’s get into some real life things I’ve used Docker for.

Experimenting in Linux

Want to test out some commands or maybe a shell script that you’re worried might be destructive? No worries, try it in a Docker container, and if you nuke the filesystem, there will be no long-term consequences.

#
# Start a container with Alpine Linux
#
$ docker run -it alpine

#
# Let's do something dumb
#
$ rm /bin/ls 
$ ls -l
/bin/sh: ls: not found

#
# Just exit the container, restart it, and our filesystem is back!
#
$ exit 
[unifi:~/tmp ] $ docker run -it alpine
$ ls /
bin    dev    etc    home   lib    media  mnt    proc   root   run    sbin   srv    sys    tmp    usr    var

And all of the above takes just a couple of seconds! This works with other Linux distros as well, such as CentOS and Unbuntu–just change your Docker command accordingly:

docker run -it centos
docker run -it ubuntu

Yes, that means you could run CentOS in a container under Ubuntu or vice-versa. Docker doesn’t care. 🙂

Month: March 2019

Monitoring RAM Usage on OS/X

The Joy of Using Docker

Experimenting in Linux