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 for ubuntu-24.04 instances:

limactl start --name=default template://ubuntu-24.04

The latest Ubuntu will be supported too in a future release.

Hint

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.

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.