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Seekable OCI: Lazy-Loading Container Images via Range-Request Indexing

摘要

这篇 arXiv 论文介绍 SOCI（Seekable OCI），一种通过构建外部索引、利用 HTTP range 请求实现容器镜像懒加载的架构。它无需修改镜像或注册表，通过 FUSE 文件系统按需拉取字节范围，实测在 1.3GB Python 镜像上冷启动拉取时间从 20 秒降至约 2.8 秒，且拉取时间与镜像大小无关。论文还给出 80% 访问密度交叉点，并说明该方案已在 Amazon EKS 和 ECS Fargate 生产环境部署多年。

荐读理由

SOCI 提供了可直接借鉴的懒加载架构：通过 OCI referrer 存索引、FUSE 拦截访问、range 请求按需拉取，无需改镜像和注册表，迁移成本低。80% 访问密度交叉点这一量化结论能帮你判断何时该用懒加载而非全量拉取，避免盲目套用。

原文

Computer Science > Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing

[Submitted on 7 Jul 2026]

Title:Seekable OCI: Lazy-Loading Container Images via Range-Request Indexing

Authors:James Thompson, Wayne Mesard, Jesse Butler, Sri Saran Balaji Rajakumar, Henry Wang

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Abstract:Container image pulling accounts for the majority of pod startup time in Kubernetes environments. Standard pull downloads the entire image before the container can start, even when the application accesses only a fraction of the image content at startup. We present SOCI (Seekable OCI), a lazy-loading architecture that enables containers to start without downloading the full image. SOCI builds an external index over standard OCI images, mapping files to byte ranges within compressed layers. At runtime, a FUSE filesystem intercepts file accesses and serves them via HTTP range requests. Unlike prior approaches that require image format conversion, SOCI works with unmodified images and standard registries. The index is stored as an OCI referrer artifact, requiring no changes to images, registries, or deployment tooling. On a 1.3 GB Python web service image, SOCI reduces cold-start pull time from 20 seconds to approximately 2.8 seconds (7.4x speedup), with pull time independent of image size. Larger images see larger speedups (9.3x on a 2.5 GB image) because SOCI pull time is constant while standard pull scales linearly. We measure a crossover at 80% access density: below this, lazy loading wins; above, parallel full pull is faster. SOCI lazy loading is deployed in production on Amazon EKS and Amazon ECS Fargate (which launched 18.4 million tasks per day during Prime Day 2025), and has been serving lazy-load requests since 2023. EKS Auto Mode uses SOCI's parallel pull mode for GPU instances.

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.06868

arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Subjects:	Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC); Operating Systems (cs.OS)
Cite as:	arXiv:2607.06868 [cs.DC]
	(or arXiv:2607.06868v1 [cs.DC] for this version)

Submission history

From: Sri Saran Balaji Vellore Rajakumar [view email] [v1] Tue, 7 Jul 2026 23:55:57 UTC (40 KB)

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