I have found that building Ember on Linux (with and without Docker) and Mac (without Docker) are fairly fast and all reasonably close in speed.

Each of those environments built in less than 15 seconds for me.

The major performance outlier was Docker for Mac. With Docker for Mac, builds took 1 minute and 16 seconds. The performance issues using Docker for Mac are well documented.

I want to specifically call out the official Docker documentation that shows this is not an Ember issue, but rather, a macOS and Docker issue that effects multiple frameworks and tools. Docker has a lengthy article on these issues.

There are a number of issues with the performance of directories bind-mounted with osxfs … Applications that behave in this way include:

rake

ember build

Symfony

Magento

Zend Framework

PHP applications that use Composer to install dependencies in a vendor folder

I have found that docker-sync was the simplest and most performant solution to this issue. Build times came in at 20 seconds, which is obviously fantastic compared to “normal” Docker for Mac speeds. I had tried a number of other workarounds beforehand. rsync scripts, Samba, NFS, but nothing worked quite as well as docker-sync.

See test data and information here.

Linux Test
Mac Test
Docker on Linux Test
Docker on Mac Test
Docker on Mac (with docker-sync) Test

Linux

Could not start watchman
Visit https://ember-cli.com/user-guide/#watchman for more info.
cleaning up...
Built project successfully. Stored in "dist/".

real	0m14.923s
user	0m14.732s
sys	0m0.800s

Mac

cleaning up...
Built project successfully. Stored in "dist/".

real	0m8.543s
user	0m6.825s
sys	0m2.156s

Docker (Linux Host)

Could not start watchman
Visit https://ember-cli.com/user-guide/#watchman for more info.
cleaning up...
Built project successfully. Stored in "dist/".

real	0m14.633s
user	0m14.752s
sys	0m0.921s

Docker (Mac Host)

Could not start watchman
Visit https://ember-cli.com/user-guide/#watchman for more info.
cleaning up...
Built project successfully. Stored in "dist/".

real	1m16.261s
user	0m19.710s
sys	0m5.730s

Docker (Mac Host with docker-sync)

Could not start watchman
Visit https://ember-cli.com/user-guide/#watchman for more info.
cleaning up...
Built project successfully. Stored in "dist/".

real	0m20.308s
user	0m17.530s
sys	0m2.040s

How I Tested

I would like to stress that these tests were not very scientific, and were subject to a number of environmental issues (what else was I running on my machine at the time? Was my hard drive or CPU being stressed?).

My goal was not to show the most accurate performance characteristics, but rather, to show how performance (relatively) varies between different builds environments. I hope this will successfully detail how dramatically performance can change between these different scenarios.

Linux and macOS

Wipe out the current $HOME/.nvm install.

rm -rf ~/.nvm/

Reinstall NVM.

Install latest lts version of node. Verify the system is using it.

nvm install --lts && which node

Install ember-cli with npm.

npm install -g ember-cli

Clone super-rentals.

git clone https://github.com/ember-learn/super-rentals

Change to the super-rentals directory.

cd super-rentals

Use yarn to install node modules.

yarn install

Time a build.

time ember build

Docker on Linux and macOS