Benchmarking the performance of proot-distro

[robertkirkman]

How much slower is proot really?

Sometimes, users ask about this, and we estimate how much it might be, but we didn't have any quantitative research for this, especially with the current updates of all components.

Benchmark Environment

Android ROM: termux-docker
proot-distro container: termux-docker
proot-distro version: 5.1.1
proot version: 5.1.107.72
Benchmark: https://github.com/kdlucas/byte-unixbench.git

Device Specifications

OS: Gentoo Linux x86_64
Kernel: Linux 6.18.28-gentoo-dist
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5950X (32) @ 5.09 GHz
GPU: AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT (the GPU was not benchmarked - this is to show that LLVMpipe is not used for background graphics tasks)
Memory: 80GiB System Memory

• 32GiB DIMM DDR4 Synchronous Unbuffered (Unregistered) 2133 MHz (0.5 ns)
• 8GiB DIMM DDR4 Synchronous Unbuffered (Unregistered) 2133 MHz (0.5 ns)
• 32GiB DIMM DDR4 Synchronous Unbuffered (Unregistered) 2133 MHz (0.5 ns)
• 8GiB DIMM DDR4 Synchronous Unbuffered (Unregistered) 2133 MHz (0.5 ns)
  Storage: Sabrent SB-RKT4P-8TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD (7.3T 3.1T 3.9T 45%)
• Swap: 128.00 KiB / 79.05 GiB (0%)

What was the device running in the background besides the benchmark, proot-distro and termux-docker?

• No other intensive tasks
• No other docker containers
• OpenRC
• Xorg
• MATE
• 26 Firefox tabs (there are a lot of ways to count tabs. the number I show here is about:telemetry#scalars-tab_search=tab browser.engagement.tab_open_event_count)
• 16 VSCodium windows
• 8 kitty terminals
• 5 tray applets
• 1 file browser window

the amount of other running processes might sound large and inappropriate for a benchmark, but the system has powerful hardware and this is a light amount of idling windows for it. I am not hiding this information so others can draw their own conclusions. I did not open or close windows while running the benchmark so I do not believe the other processes running affected the results.

Benchmark Results

outside proot-distro:

Run 1. 11861.1
Run 2. 12113.9
Run 3. 11990.8

inside proot-distro:

Run 1. 6746.3
Run 2. 6811.0
Run 3. 6466.3

In UNIXbench, proot-distro has a 44% lower score than docker/chroot.