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

[LordMonoxide]

• 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

[Drakota]

Same here with Docker running on Ubuntu 18.04

[benhillis]

Thanks for opening the issue. We have a fix for this in the works.

[mithunshanbhag]

After moving to WSL2, VmMem seems to be constantly pegging my CPU. Please see attached screenshots.

Anything I can do to help your team troubleshoot?

Relevant details:

• Ubuntu 18.04 and Debian on WSL2, but none are running anything at the moment.
• Windows insider build 18917.1000 on Macbook Air (8 GB, 4 proc).

[crispinb]

After moving to WSL2, VmMem seems to be constantly pegging my CPU. Please see attached screenshots.

I'm experiencing this too. It happens every time I run wsl after some elapsed time (varying from minutes to hours). It continues regardless of what's running in wsl, and I need to issue a wsl --shutdown to stop it.

Windows insider build: 18922.1000
Linux distro: 18.04

I assume this really belongs in a new issue, but wanted to group my comment with that of @mithunshanbhag so I'll leave it here.

[md0x]

Hi,
Same problem here.
Lots of memory consumption with WSL2, nodejs app and VS Code with Remote - WSL while very low consumption in WSL1 with the same tasks.

[liyo]

Same issue on Win build 18950

[zachChilders]

@benhillis - Do we have a rough ETA on the fix? I'm actually hitting OOM issues on a machine with 32 gigs while just running a normal ninja build that should succeed.

Build 18955

[benhillis]

@zachChilders - ETA on this one is a bit hard unfortunately. Certainly before WSL2 ships to non-insiders.

[avafloww]

Can confirm this on 18963 as well. WSL 2 ate most (29GB+ of 32GB) of my RAM after less than 15 minutes of uptime for no good reason; all I've done is a rsync from the host NTFS volume to the ext4 volume, and an apt-get update.

[david-dumke]

I can confirm the same issue on Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.18963.1000]

C:\Users\david_d>wsl -l -v
NAME STATE VERSION

• Ubuntu-18.04 Running 2
  Ubuntu Stopped 1

I at the time was running gdb