In a previous project, I built an elastic transcoder farm that used Docker (Alpine), Python, and FFmpeg.
Since the system had to be very cost-efficient, I wanted to make sure the underlying docker image wasn’t creating too much overhead.
After some research, I stumbled upon this StackOverflow question that questioned the FFmpeg execution performance and my Python code when using Alpine.
Turns out, Alpine might be small but in some cases, it can slow things down quite a bit due to some of the equivalent libraries that are used.
I was disheartened. After working so well with my Go projects, I had defaulted to use it with Python to get smaller images.
This led me to start from scratch, benchmark a series of distributions, and create my new default docker image.