What limits the frame rate: MediaPipe, Docker and a MuJoCo viewer on one laptop
The single-script version felt smoother than the containers. The obvious suspect was Docker. The measurements say otherwise — and point at something more interesting: two programs sharing one integrated GPU. Setup # Laptop with an Intel Comet Lake CPU (12 threads) and Intel UHD Graphics; Linux on Wayland with XWayland; USB webcam at 640×480, 30 fps, YUYV. Each row: mean of 150 frames after a 10-frame warm-up, no hand in view. Measured 2026-09-16.
The result # Condition Camera read MediaPipe imshow Loop Vision alone, container 10.0 ms 19.0 ms 4.5 ms 29.8 Hz Vision alone, host venv (MediaPipe 0.10.11) 10.6 ms 19.2 ms 3.9 ms 29.7 Hz Container vision + 1-core CPU burner 8.2 ms 23.5 ms 3.9 ms 28.1 Hz Host vision + plain MuJoCo viewer on host (no Docker, no ROS) 1.6 ms 54.9 ms 5.9 ms 16.0 Hz Container vision + mujoco_twin capped at 30 Hz 1.7 ms 63.7 ms 8.1 ms 13.6 Hz Container vision + mujoco_twin as shipped 1.9 ms 85.6 ms 10.2 ms 10.2 Hz End to end, ros2 topic hz /hand/target_flexions read 30.0 Hz with only vision_tracker running and 10.7 Hz once mujoco_twin started.