Dealing With Large Docker Pulls Over Slow Connections

If you’ve got a slow internet connection and are trying to pull a large collection of images, you may encounter retries causing the entire pull to fail, not to mention multiple concurrent downloads sucking up all your bandwidth.

I found that the following Docker daemon configuration changes helped:

• Set max-concurrent-downloads to 1
• Bump max-download-attempts to something relatively high, like 20

The resulting JSON would look a little like this:

{
  "builder": {
    "gc": {
      "defaultKeepStorage": "20GB",
      "enabled": true
    }
  },
  "experimental": false,
 
  "max-concurrent-downloads": 1,
  "max-download-attempts": 20
}

It won’t speed up your pulls, but at least you can let them run in the background without the retries failing on you.