Accelerating start-up time with eStargz

eStargz is an OCI-compatible container image format that reduces start-up latency using lazy-pulling technique.

The support for eStargz is available by default in Lima.

{{% alert title="Hint" color=success %}} ARM Mac users need to run limactl start with --rosetta to allow running AMD64 binaries. This is not an architectural limitation of eStargz, however, Rosetta is needed because the example Python image below is currently only available for AMD64. {{% /alert %}}

Without eStargz:

$ time lima nerdctl run --platform=amd64 ghcr.io/stargz-containers/python:3.13-org python3 -c 'print("hi")'
[...]
hi

real	0m23.767s
user	0m0.025s
sys	0m0.020s

With eStargz:

$ time lima nerdctl --snapshotter=stargz run --platform=amd64 ghcr.io/stargz-containers/python:3.13-esgz python3 -c 'print("hi")'
[...]
hi

real	0m13.365s
user	0m0.026s
sys	0m0.021s

Examples of eStargz images can be found at https://github.com/containerd/stargz-snapshotter/blob/main/docs/pre-converted-images.md.

See also:

• https://github.com/containerd/stargz-snapshotter
• https://github.com/containerd/nerdctl/blob/main/docs/stargz.md