It used to, but the newer Docker for Mac uses xhyve which is more lightweight. It also by default runs a pretty stripped down version of Linux. The default VM s

It used to, but the newer Docker for Mac uses xhyve which is more lightweight. It also by default runs a pretty stripped down version of Linux. The default VM size is 2Gb, but you can increase that if you need to. I'm currently working on a project which involves a Docker replication of a production environment. The Docker Compose environment has 7 docker containers including Cassandra, Kafka and Flink plus some nodejs micro-services. This all runs happily in a 6Gb docker container leaving memory free for Eclipse, Atom, Outlook and a bunch of other applications on a 16Gb 2015 MacBook Pro. At no point have I felt that the machine is performing poorly due to memory exhaustion.