Not sure if I am missing something but this shouldn't be all that surprising. The process you execute in the container is being handled by the same kernel as th

Not sure if I am missing something but this shouldn't be all that surprising. The process you execute in the container is being handled by the same kernel as the host. I think this is a common fundamental misunderstanding of what docker is. If it's a fork bomb on your host (and this is) it's a fork bomb with docker too. Now the interesting thing about docker is you can control this in similar ways you'd do to control this via VMs and that is via kernel primitives (cgroups) to control resource allocation. In general if you are running docker containers in production you should be explicitly allocating resources via cgroups according to the needs of your applications. If you are writing and deploying software that fork bombs (why?) then you should mitigate the effects of the noisy neighbor via the kernel features. The benefit here is you don't need the (extremely, IMO) heavyweight overhead of running separate OSes in VMs.