Produced Docker Image has very large HDD footprint

[rubenst2013]

I love this new official Docker Image for Oracle DB

Though, call me ignorant, the produced size of an empty DB Docker Image takes up about 11.1GB and pre-building an otherwise empty DB out of it amounts to a grand total of whooping 15GB! O.O Am I missing any cleanup steps here? Otherwise the sheer size of the thing hinders our efforts and definitely is any issue for us.

Thanks in advance for any assistance. :)

Edit: I used 12.1.0.2 SE2

[brunoborges]

Out of curiosity, what is your average VM size with only the DB installed?

[clemSeveillac]

@rubenst2013 note you can significantly lower the image size by "squashing" its layers, with that flow (which will become a one liner in docker 1.13 experimental mode):

1. ./buildDockerImage.sh
2. docker run --name tmp true
3. docker export tmp | docker import - newSquashedRawImageName
4. (with a very similar Dockerfile where FROM points to newSquashedRawImageName and you removed all RUN and COPY statements) docker build -t newSquashedImageName .

That's it, your latest image now weights 6 GB!

[rubenst2013]

@brunoborges : Our average, empty DB/VM size (VMware) is right around what @clemSeveillac said: 6GB

@clemSeveillac : Thanks for the info, I will give that a go ASAP and keep you guys posted of my progress :+1:

[rubenst2013]

it worked, the image actually got quite a bit smaller! YAY :D

REPOSITORY	TAG	IMAGE ID	CREATED	SIZE
oracle/db-squashed	12.1.0.2-se2	6aceb22776be	6 seconds ago	9.80 GB
oracle/db-prebuilt	12.1.0.2-se2	4c44e5f0d638	17 hours ago	15.16 GB
oracle/database	12.1.0.2-se2	83bb12215fad	17 hours ago	11.14 GB
oraclelinux	latest	4c357c6e421e	6 days ago	225 MB

Though ~10 GB is still a bit heavy for an empty DB I think... I poked around inside the container:

[root@c0d45fecdcdf oracle]# pwd
/opt/oracle
[root@c0d45fecdcdf oracle]# du -h --max-depth=1
460K    ./admin
6.6M    ./diag
**5.2G  ./product**
**3.8G  ./oradata**
18M ./fast_recovery_area
4.0K    ./audit
18M ./cfgtoollogs
4.0K    ./checkpoints
1.2M    ./oraInventory
8.9G    .

Things I will try next is the special docker squash tool https://github.com/jwilder/docker-squash and I will setup a box with Docker 1.13 which has a --squash build flag.

Also I'm not quite sure what @clemSeveillac means by "docker run --name tmp true". Simply as a means to "create" a container from the image is my best guess.

(I've got still loads of things to learn about Docker and Linux in general :) )

Thanks for your help so far and I hope we can find ways to make this awesome container a bit easier to lift.

[brunoborges]

Alright, glad things worked out! :+1:

[clemSeveillac]

Same here, glad we helped you save some space! @rubenst2013 while oradata is exactly taking the space you want (tablespaces etc.), I agree product is annoyingly big...

-> Folks, if you find way to remove unneeded things from product, I'm all ears -- besides the obvious /opt/oracle/product/12.1.0.2/dbhome_1/sqldeveloper which you probably don't need in your container and which takes 167 MB.

And yeah, running true was the way I found back then to create the simplest container from an image in order to reimport it as one layer :)

[brunoborges]

Hey @gvenzl... Based on @clemSeveillac's suggestion of removing sqldeveloper folder, what do you think of a shrinkInstallation.sh script that removes that, and other (useless in a container) things?

[rubenst2013]

I think a special shrink script, one for post-installation and perhaps one for housekeeping would be awesome! Edit: Also, what about moving things like sqlplus to a data-only container or the likes, which can be linked in when needed.