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To fill the knowledge gap, this paper presents the first measurement study on Wasm-based container runtime (i.e., Wasm container) by comparison with the Docker container and native standalone Wasm runtime for execution performance in terms of the startup, computation, system interface access, and resource consumption. Surprisingly, we find that the Wasm container does not achieve better performance versus the Docker container as expected and introduces significant overhead compared to the standalone Wasm runtime. Through comparison, we identify the main causes of performance degradation for Wasm containers. Some stem from the heavy containerization overhead similar to Docker containers, while others are inherently caused by Wasm VMs and the WASI interface. Our findings can help software developers, Wasm container developers and the Wasm community improve the efficiency of utilizing Wasm-based container runtime, ultimately optimizing software performance.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1145\/3712197","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2025,2,7]],"date-time":"2025-02-07T17:31:44Z","timestamp":1738949504000},"page":"1-22","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":5,"title":["WebAssembly for Container Runtime: Are We There Yet?"],"prefix":"10.1145","volume":"34","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0002-7625-8721","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Mugeng","family":"Liu","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Key Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technologies, Ministry of Education, Beijing, China and School of Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing, China"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0000-4599-3198","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Haiyang","family":"Shen","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Peking University, Beijing, China"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-3466-0165","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Yixuan","family":"Zhang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Key Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technologies, Ministry of Education, Beijing, China and School of Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing, China"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-2380-3976","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Hong","family":"Mei","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Key Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technologies, Ministry of Education, Beijing, China and School of Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing, China"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-7866-4075","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Yun","family":"Ma","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Peking University, Beijing, China"}]}],"member":"320","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2025,7,2]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_3_2_1_2","unstructured":"GitHub. 2024. 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