Diagnose slow Cloud Development Environments

Reduce workspace start time

Cache images with Image Puller

When starting a workspace, OpenShift pulls the images from the registry. A workspace can include many containers meaning that OpenShift pulls Pod’s images (one per container). Depending on the size of the image and the bandwidth, it can take a long time.

Image Puller is a tool that can cache images on each of OpenShift nodes. As such, pre-pulling images can improve start times.

Choose a faster storage type

Every workspace has a shared volume attached. This volume stores the project files, so that when restarting a workspace, changes are still available. Depending on the storage, attach time can take up to a few minutes, and I/O can be slow.

Install in offline mode

Components of OpenShift Dev Spaces are OCI images. Configure Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces in offline mode to reduce any extra download at runtime because everything needs to be available from the beginning.

Reduce the number of public endpoints

For each endpoint, OpenShift is creating OpenShift Route objects. Depending on the underlying configuration, this creation can be slow.

To avoid this problem, reduce the exposure. For example, Microsoft Visual Code - Open Source has three optional routes. These routes automatically detect a new port listening inside containers and redirect traffic for processes using a local IP address (127.0.0.1).

By reducing the number of endpoints and checking endpoints of all plugins, workspace start can be faster.