microsoft / microsoft/WSL

WSL 2 consumes massive amounts of RAM and doesn't return it

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#4,166 459 comments 452 reactions 1 assignee View on GitHub

@benhillis is already working on this.

Since Jun 17, 2019.

wsl2
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C++
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Description

  • Your Windows build number: 18917

  • What's wrong / what should be happening instead: WSL 2 starts using huge amounts of RAM after a while, just using it like normal. At the moment I'm using phpstorm, and did a dump/load of a database. Vmmem is using 7 GB of my 16 GB of RAM and not returning any, even though Ubuntu is actually using much less. I have seen it grow until nearly 100% of my system memory is in use, and it will not release it until I shut down the WSL 2 VM.

This may or may not be related to #4159

corey@Corey-Laptop:/mnt/c/WINDOWS/system32$ vmstat -s
     15235516 K total memory
       920348 K used memory
      1886048 K active memory
      6434312 K inactive memory
      6606548 K free memory
        76280 K buffer memory
      7632340 K swap cache
            0 K total swap
            0 K used swap
            0 K free swap
       163729 non-nice user cpu ticks
          298 nice user cpu ticks
        13177 system cpu ticks
     68988300 idle cpu ticks
         8962 IO-wait cpu ticks
            0 IRQ cpu ticks
        10022 softirq cpu ticks
            0 stolen cpu ticks
      1481417 pages paged in
      6792976 pages paged out
            0 pages swapped in
            0 pages swapped out
      1079177 interrupts
      5131981 CPU context switches
   1560599814 boot time
         8772 forks

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