You’re correct that nesting namespaces is unlikely to introduce measurable performance degradation. For performance, I was thinking mostly in the nested virtual network stack adding latency. Both docker and lxc run their own virtual interfaces.
There’s also the issue of running nested apparmor, selinux, and/or seccomp checks on processes in the child containers. I know that single instances of those are often enough to kill performance on highly latency sensitive applications (SAP netweaver is the example that comes to mind) so I would imagine two instances of those checks would exacerbate those concerns.
You’re correct that nesting namespaces is unlikely to introduce measurable performance degradation. For performance, I was thinking mostly in the nested virtual network stack adding latency. Both docker and lxc run their own virtual interfaces.
There’s also the issue of running nested apparmor, selinux, and/or seccomp checks on processes in the child containers. I know that single instances of those are often enough to kill performance on highly latency sensitive applications (SAP netweaver is the example that comes to mind) so I would imagine two instances of those checks would exacerbate those concerns.