The individual process inside the vm might not consume much, but the vm itself might reserve some GBs of memory. Try looking at how much memory `vmmem` process used in task manager.
https://www.reddit.com/r/bashonubuntuonwindows/comments/d8x7...
"So, I was copying a 8GB file to my Debian home folder using Windows Explorer, via $wsl network. The copy process made my CPU's fan runs like a jetplane, and it stop copying when at 95%, then I opened up Task Manager and saw this.
even after it finish copying, Vmmem process still hold 13GB RAM and not release any. Why? I have to shutdown WSL after copy a big file?
Answer:
Very normal but annoying issue. ... The only solutions are:
a) a kernel change by MS to limit the amount WSL2 can cache b) disable to caching ( nocache ) c) Put a limit on the WSL hyper-v VM
Not sure what or how MS will try to solve this issue... WSL1 did not have this issue, because it shared the main system memory, because it was just a layer around the NT kernel."
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/memory-reclaim-in...