Do you run Docker in a VM or on the host node? I'm running a lot of LXC at home on Proxmox but sometimes it'd be nice to run Docker stuff easily as well.
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.
Thanks for the tip, for some reason I assumed I couldn't run docker in LXC but never actually tried... I prefer to avoid the overhead of a full VM and I find LXCs way easier to manage from the host system. Guess I'll have something to test this weekend. Cheers!