Benchmarks

Test Environment

All benchmarks run on Apple Silicon hardware (M3 Max, 36 GB RAM, macOS 15). Numbers represent the median of multiple runs with warm caches unless otherwise noted.

Container Startup

10,000 container starts using alpine:latest:

Metric	ArcBox	Docker Desktop	Speedup
Cold start (mean)	312ms	1,247ms	4.0x
Cold start (p99)	580ms	2,100ms	3.6x
Warm start (mean)	89ms	487ms	5.5x
Warm start (p99)	145ms	820ms	5.7x

Where the Difference Comes From

Lighter hypervisor — Virtualization.framework adds ~100ms overhead vs ~400ms for Docker Desktop's VM
Optimized kernel — stripped-down guest kernel with minimal module loading
Smart caching — pre-warmed filesystem snapshots eliminate redundant work
Apple Silicon native — no translation layer, direct hardware access

File I/O

Sequential read/write throughput using fio with a 1 GB test file:

Operation	ArcBox	Docker Desktop	Native
Sequential read	4.2 GB/s	2.8 GB/s	4.5 GB/s
Sequential write	3.8 GB/s	2.1 GB/s	4.1 GB/s
Random 4K read	95K IOPS	62K IOPS	105K IOPS
Random 4K write	88K IOPS	54K IOPS	98K IOPS

ArcBox achieves >90% of native filesystem performance for most workloads.

Memory Usage

State	ArcBox	Docker Desktop
Idle (no containers)	130 MB	220 MB
1 container (nginx)	180 MB	310 MB
10 containers	420 MB	850 MB
50 containers	1.2 GB	2.8 GB

ArcBox returns memory to the host as containers stop. Docker Desktop retains allocated memory until the VM is restarted.

Network Throughput

iperf3 between host and container:

Metric	ArcBox	Docker Desktop
TCP throughput	52 Gbps	44 Gbps
UDP throughput	48 Gbps	38 Gbps
Latency (ping)	0.15ms	0.4ms

Methodology

All benchmarks are reproducible. Source code and scripts are available at github.com/arcboxd/arcbox-benchmarks.

Results vary by hardware. Run the benchmark suite on your own machine for numbers specific to your setup.