A Comprehensive Study of Data Reduction Methods on Docker Container Images
Haoliang Tan, Lisha Qin, Xiangyu Zou, Cai Deng, Zhaoquan Gu, Wen Xia · 2025
The rapid growth of Docker images in cloud infrastructures has intensified storage and network demands, posing challenges to QoS for registries and deployments. This paper systematically evaluates four data reduction methods—file-level and block-level deduplication, delta compression, and local compression—on 18 representative images. We quantify their tradeoffs in compression, computation, I/O overhead, and restore performance, revealing that (1) filtering large files ($>64 \text{KB}$) preserves 80% of redundancy elimination at half the cost, (2) category-based reorganization reduces restore latency by 83%, and (3) fixed-size chunking with optimized blocks balances memory and compression. Based on these insights, we propose adaptive strategies for efficient container storage.