Expected Performance For ARM build on MacOS M1

[JeremyLoy]

hey 👋

I didn't want to open an issue without first trying out a discussion because I'm not sure if I'm having a problem, or if my expectations just aren't correct.

My goal is to build a docker image containing nodejs on my M1 macbook and deploy it to a Rasberry Pi Zero. So amd64 -> armv6, however it is excruciatingly slow, to the point that I'm not sure if I have something fundamentally broken on my machine.

docker run --rm -it --platform=linux/arm/v6 alpine /bin/sh
$ uname -m 
> armv7l
$ apk add nodejs npm
$ node --version
> v20.11.1
$ node -e 'console.log("hello world")'
# this never completes. I've tried a few times and its run for nearly a half hour

Installing NodeJS through APK was slow, but acceptable. I understand that emulation will be slower, but it was still just a few seconds, maybe a minute to install.

I attached an additional shell session to the running container to measure usage using top and was surprised to see such little utilization, however when looking through Activity Monitor I was fully maxing out 1 core.

As for my setup, I'm using colima with pretty standard settings. 6 cpu cores allocated.

I followed the README in this repo to set everything up, so the following command:

docker run --rm --privileged multiarch/qemu-user-static --reset -p yes

---

So do you all think this is a Node problem? Or do you think there is something wrong with my setup? Do you have anything else I can try to benchmark my system?

As it stands, I might have to just start SCPing my project onto my Rasberry Pi!

Thanks for your time

[martin-g]

I'd suggest to strace it and see where it "hangs".

$ strace node -e 'console.log("hello world")'

[JeremyLoy]

I figured it out. turns out that colima defaults to x86 as the architecture, without rosetta enabled, even if the machine itself is ARM (like the M1 is).

So I was running two layers of poorly optimized emulation!

rebuilding my colima VM with aarch64 as the architecture solved the perf issues, and in general was a speedup across all of my tasks