# Docker lazy loading at Grab: Accelerating container startup times

[Grab](https://yomu.fyi/company/grab) · Huong Vuong · Jan 21, 2026

## Summary

Grab addressed slow cold starts and auto-scaling bottlenecks caused by large container images across data platforms like Airflow and Spark Connect. To eliminate the requirement of downloading complete images before launching, the team evaluated Docker lazy loading via remote snapshotters using eStargz and Seekable OCI (SOCI). Unlike eStargz, which modifies image layers and increased application startup delays during benchmarks, SOCI stores index metadata separately as OCI Artifacts without altering image digests. In production on Amazon EKS, tuning SOCI concurrency and chunk parameters reduced fresh-node image download times by 60%, ultimately delivering a 30% to 40% reduction in P95 startup times.

## Takeaways

- Benchmarking showed SOCI matched standard OverlayFS with a 5.0-second Airflow application startup time, whereas eStargz took 25.0 seconds.
- SOCI preserves existing image digests and signatures without requiring image conversions by storing file indices as separate OCI Artifacts.
- Tuning SOCI snapshotter parameters for Amazon ECR—increasing concurrent downloads and unparks to 10 and chunk size to 16MB—lowered fresh-node download times from 60 to 24 seconds.

**Tags:** [AWS](https://yomu.fyi/topic/aws), [Docker](https://yomu.fyi/topic/docker), [Kubernetes](https://yomu.fyi/topic/kubernetes), [Performance](https://yomu.fyi/topic/performance)

[Read original post](https://engineering.grab.com/docker-lazy-loading)