A bit of a misleading title. Comparing linux containers to native performance wouldn't be terribly interesting; there is little reason to believe there is any

A bit of a misleading title. Comparing linux containers to native performance wouldn't be terribly interesting; there is little reason to believe there is any nontrivial overhead from using cgroups, chroot, etc. Instead, this is comparing different Docker configurations to native performance (to Virtual Machines as well). The insights one can get is the amount of I/O overhead that is introduced by using local NAT as well as AUFS. (turns out NAT and AUFS overhead are quite significant.) Finally, figure 17 is a bit interesting. It implies that there is some inherent overhead (before NAT/AUFS) of 2% from the container; it'd be interesting to find out what the source of that is. /aside: putting percentage loss and absolute numbers on the same graph (figure 16) is incredibly confusing.