How to increase the size of the /dev/shm in docker container

Solution 1:

If you're using docker-compose, you can set the your_service.shm_size value if you want your container to use that /dev/shm size when running or your_service.build.shm_size when building.

Example:

version: '3.5'
services:
  your_service:
    build:
      context: .
      shm_size: '2gb' <-- this will set the size when BUILDING
    shm_size: '2gb' <-- when RUNNING 

Link to source.

Solution 2:

You can modify shm size by passing the optional parameter --shm-size to docker run command. The default is 64MB.

eg:

docker run -it --shm-size=256m oracle11g /bin/bash

Solution 3:

If you use docker-compose to set up your docker environment, it is also possible to set the shared memory in the docker-compose.yml configuration file:

build:
  context: .
  shm_size: '2gb'

More info in the compose-file docs:

• version 3
• version 2

Solution 4:

If anybody is using an older docker version prior 1.10.0 and cannot upgrade for some reason, there is a workaround I used to set shm-size which works fine for me (you need sudo-rights to create the mount on the host):

sudo mkdir /mnt/dockershm
sudo mount -t tmpfs -o size=1G tmpfs /mnt/dockershm
docker run -d -v /mnt/dockershm:/dev/shm dockerimagetorun:latest