you should check out nspawn, lets you run services inside linux namespace isolated LXC containers
Discussion
I've looked at it because that's what @cloudfodder is doing with relay.tools
But I've not seen a performance comparison
well it's just LXC, you can do a similar thing with libvirt also, but nspawn lets you run them as system services
docker containers default to this environment also but docker is a little more overhead and complexity with the layered filesystem, nspawn you have to make it all in one layer