Hi, I would like to use Testcontainers for testing applications with the DB2 12.1 Community docker image (icr.io/db2_community/db2:12.1.0.0).

But starting up the DB2 docker container is very slow. It does not seem to be an issue with testcontainers itself, because it is just as slow when I start the container myself following the instructions and env_list.txt from Installing the Db2 Community Edition Docker image on Windows systems.

$ time docker run -h db2server --name db2server --restart=always --privileged=true -p  50000:50000 --env-file env_list.txt -v D:/db2-community/database:/database icr.io/db2_community/db2 2>&1 | grep -m1 "Setup has completed"
(*) Setup has completed.

real    1m45.566s
user    0m0.015s
sys     0m0.152s

With the following tweaks to env_list.txt, there is some speedup:

TO_CREATE_SAMPLEDB=false
REPODB=false
AUTOCONFIG=false
ARCHIVE_LOGS=false

$ time docker run -h db2server --name db2server --restart=always --privileged=true -p  50000:50000 --env-file env_list_faster.txt -v D:/db2-community/database:/database icr.io/db2_community/db2 2>&1 | grep -m1 "Setup has completed"
(*) Setup has completed.

real    1m5.743s
user    0m0.015s
sys     0m0.030s

But still, over 1 minute startup is not really usable for automated testing scenario.

Even in the official documentation it is mentioned that "After the docker run command is executed, it will take a couple of minutes for the container to finish setting up."

Does anyone have any other tips to improve the startup time?

When starting up from an existing volume mount with initialized DB, there is some more speedup:

$ time docker run -h db2server --name db2server --restart=always --privileged=true -p  50000:50000 --env-file env_list_faster.txt -v D:/db2-community/database:/database icr.io/db2_community/db2 2>&1 | grep -m1 "Setup has completed"
(*) Setup has completed.

real    0m39.585s
user    0m0.015s
sys     0m0.046s

But even that is quite slow, and also doesn't really fit the testcontainers philosophy of creating a new isolated throwaway container from scratch.

For comparison, on the same machine, a MariaDB docker containers starts up in 6 seconds, and PostgreSQL starts up in less than 2 seconds.

Kind regards,

Jimmy

Hello Jimmy,

we are experiencing the same thing.

Starting the container in our CI/CD system takes around 2 minutes. 

I haven't found a way to speedup the start much more than with your flags.

We use the DB2 for integration testing and clean up the database after each test (which also takes some time but not as much as restarting the whole container).