Multiple threads inside docker container

Question

I need to spawn N threads inside a docker container. I am going to receive a list of elements, then divide it in chunks and each thread will process each chunk.

So I am using a docker container with one process and N threads. Is it good practice in docker? I think so, because we have, e.g, apacha webserver that handle connections spawining threads.

Or it will be better to spawn N container each one for each chunk? If it is, what is the correct way to do this?

Answer 1

A container as such has nothing to do with the computation you need to perform. The question you are posting is whether I should have multiple processes doing my processing or multiple threads spawned by the same process doing the processing ?

A container is just a platform for running your application in the environment you want. Period. It means, you would be running a process inside a container to run your business logic. Multiple containers simply means multiple processes and as it is advised, you should go for multiple threads rather than multiple processes as spawning a new process (in your case, as container) would eat up more resources and would also require more memory etc. So it is better to have just one container which will spawn multiple threads to do the job for you.

However, it also depends upon the configuration of the underlying machine on which the container is started. If it makes sense to spawn multiple containers with multiple threads because of the multicore capabilities of the underlying hardware, you should do that as well.