Performance and Usability Implications of Multiplatform and WebAssembly Containers

Docker and WebAssembly (Wasm) are two pivotal technologies in modern software development, each offering unique strengths in portability and performance. The rise of Wasm, particularly in conjunction with container runtimes, highlights its potential to enhance efficiency in diverse application stacks. However, a notable gap remains in understanding how Wasm containers perform relative to traditional multi-platform containers across multiple architectures and workloads, especially when optimizations are employed. In this paper, we aim to empirically assess the performance and usability implications of native multi-platform containers versus Wasm containers under optimized configurations. We focus on critical metrics including startup time, pull time (both fresh and cached), and image sizes for three distinct workloads and architectures- AMD64 (AWS bare metal) and two embedded boards: Nvidia Jetson Nano with ARM64 and Starfive VisionFive2 with RISCV64. To address these objectives, we c onducted a series of experiments using docker and containerd in multi-platform built images for native containers and Wasmtime as the WebAssembly runtime within contain-erd/docker’s ecosystem. Our findings show that while native containers achieve slightly faster startup times, Wasm containers excel in agility and maintain image sizes of approximately 27.0% of their native counterparts and a significant reduction in pull times across all three architectures of up to 25% using containerd. With continued optimizations, Wasm has the potential to emerge as a viable choice in environments that demand both reduced image size and cross-platform portability. It will not replace the current container paradigm soon; rather, it will be integrated into this framework and complement containers instead of replacing them.