Watchtower: Why does watchtower make so many requests to registry-1.docker.io

[yurividal]

My watchtower makes thousands of requests per day to registry-1.docker.io

Wheni disable this container, the requests to docker reduce. I dont need watchtower to check updates every minute. what's wrong?

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[victorcmoura]

Hi, @yurividal! Watchtower natively works by checking periodically for updates. You can adjust how frequently it polls through the Poll Interval argument. By default, this argument is 300s (or 5min), which results in 288 requests per day (or 25.920 in 90 days, which is the time period you've used as a reference).

Given this context, you have two options:

• Keep using the interval-based polling (and maybe reduce the polling frequency);
• Use the HTTP API Mode;

With HTTP API Mode, instead of actively looking for the updates, Watchtower exposes an endpoint that can be requested to trigger a one time check. You can develop your own logic to request this endpoint and trigger an update. These are a few use cases:

• If you have a CI job that pushes new images to DockerHub, create a next job that requests your Watchtower instance to tell it when new updates are available;
• If manual deployments suit better for your context, create a script or a form button that sends a request to your Watchtower instance, triggering the update;

I hope it can help you understand and, maybe, even optimize your Watchtower setup :)

[yurividal]

It's set to 90 days but this DNS is actually only 2 weeks old.
45 thousand in 2 weeks.

Anyways, I'll try to set the WATCHTOWER_POLL_INTERVAL to once per day, and I'll see if it solves

[Kopernikus1979]

Same here, saw it in my Pi-Hole statistics it's indeed every 5 minutes, but it makes 32 A & AAA request instead of 1, so instead of 288 request a day they are 9216 request a day.... I think there's something wrong there...

``

[zoispag]

Same here, saw it in my Pi-Hole statistics it's indeed every 5 minutes, but it makes 32 A & AAA request instead of 1, so instead of 288 request a day they are 9216 request a day.... I think there's something wrong there...

``

How many containers does watchtower monitor?

[Kopernikus1979]

6 containers including watchtower

[yurividal]

Mine seems to be working fine after I set the Poll Interval manually to 43200 (12 hours). I see about 17 requests twice a day now. Much lower than the thousands a day I was seeing.
Still, not sure why it needs 17 dns requests to the same address every time it runs. (I have 5 containers including wt)

[piksel]

Watchtower itself doesn't access the registry, but rather tells the docker daemon to do so. You can limit how often this happens, but I don't think we can do anything about the number of lookups that each check does.

[Kopernikus1979]

Hi,

No problem I will set the Interval manually to 43200.

Thx

[simskij]

If you prefer cron expressions over configuring intervals, you could use the --schedule argument instead.

Closing this issue as a clear workaround path has been provided.
Thanks you for contributing!