Set limits to docker containers, when using dokku

2022-03-13

If you're using Dokku and Docker for your project, in some cases your docker containers can syphon all the juice from your machine and it's not really fair for your other containers. They have feelings too, you know.

It's is fairly easy to do with Dokku, but depending on your base Operating System, it varies a little bit. If you look at the official documentation, there is a big and very useful warning:

Excerpt from the documentation

Let me rephrase some of it like this : Values specified are dependent on the docker scheduler.

This scheduler can vary a bit from Operating System to another. So this article will talk about the default docker scheduler on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

You can set a good variety of limits:

  • cpu
  • memory
  • memory-swap
  • network-ingress
  • network-egress
  • nvidia-gpu

The cpu limit is pretty easy to remember :

dokku resource:limit <your_app> --cpu 1

The memory limit need a suffix :

dokku resource:limit <your_app> --memory 1g

According to the documentation, the default suffix is m, for megabyte.

Documentation is a bit light on network-ingress and network-egress, but it seems to be as simple:

dokku resource:limit <your_app> --network-ingress 1g --network-egress 1g

For those unfamiliar with the terms, ingress means incoming traffic, egress means outgoing traffic.

At any time you can read your report with dokku resource:report <your_app>.

Very important

Don't forget that you need to restart your application for the new values to be applied.

dokku ps:restart <your_app>

It's also a good hygiene to do it, instead of having a bad surprise at the next automatic deploy of your <you_app>.

Have fun!*