WPE Container Prevents other container(s) from running

I recently tried the balean-dashboard, which uses the WPE container to create a Kiosk on a local interface, which is EXACTLY what our project needs.

The bad part is that I can not get WPE to load and run with all my containers up and running.

Our application consists of 4 containers: 3 apps and a monitor/watchdog process.

Everything up and works, until I add the WPE container: with the WPE container, 3 of my containers will start along with WPE. It is not 100% predictable which container will NOT start.

As an experiment, I moved all my apps into a single container, giving WPE its own container, with two containers, WPE starts up, but my application container stays in the ā€œdownloadedā€ state.

Manually trying to start it does not do anything (as I would expect)

Any thoughts on why the WPE container wonā€™t work with other containers?

Size, mem or CPU being maxed out are thoughts of mine, but I do not get any indication what is preventing one of the containers to startupā€¦

Any or all help will be appreciated!

Hi Rusty, are there any errors coming from balenaEngine or your containers when they fail to startup?

Well I have not seen an errors that are obviously related to the container that stays in the ā€˜installedā€™ state.

I did notice though, the single container I am building comes out be 973 MB (I have no idea why the container is so large. Hell, we can run an entire VM for 1G worth of appsā€¦

973 + 122(for wpe) puts me at about the 1G of RAM that our Pi2 has.

Could it be a problem if the containers sizes add up to greater than the RAM in the device?

If that is the case, how I can I trace down where my container becomes so bulky so I can hopefully whittle it down to something useable with the WPE contianer.

There is a great utility called ā€œDiveā€ I have successfully used in the past to dig into docker image bloat, perhaps give that a go and see if cutting down the size of your containers is possible/any help? https://github.com/wagoodman/dive

Thanks @wrboyce, I am, am going to give that utility and try see what It can tell me.

In the meantime, I am building on an image that I just ā€œstarted withā€, I am the software was built to run with ubuntu/raspbian variant.

I wonder if there is a smaller debian based image I can use. I had been tempted to move over to alpine, however that would require rewriting scripts and install packages, so Iā€™ll stick with debian for now.

Thanks for the tip, Iā€™ll report what I findā€¦

OK, I solved my problem: I was exporting port 8080 from different containers. It looks like a conflict will just stop a container from startingā€¦

Great news, thanks for letting us know Rusty. Iā€™ll pass this feedback on as it sounds like something we could perhaps detect and warn about when building the release.

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Sounds good, thanks for the help!!!