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Comment by matsemann | Hacker News Reader

Wish they fixed the issue where it uses all available RAM even when running no containers yet.

That’s not an issue though. That’s just how virtual machines work. You’re carving out a chunk of your system for the docker Linux VM that runs your containers.

You can open up the docker app and configure a smaller amount of ram if it impacts your host OS

No, that's not how it works with WSL2 as the backend. You then cannot configure a smaller amount of RAM in the docker app, it's greyed out. One can limit the RAM that WSL has, but that's not really helpful when docker steals all of it. (And WSL2 supports dynamic allocation of memory anyways, so it's supposed to return unused memory to the host)

So you are wrong. For those of us affected by the bug, it's a big issue.

Linux considers unused RAM to be wasted RAM. WSL 2 addresses this with a Linux kernel change that right now is insiders only. I expect it to land with Windows 11.

You can configure the max memory in wsl 2 with .wslconfig file.

yes, but docker will eat whatever I give to it, leaving nothing for the actual containers or other stuff in wsl

That's not how virtual machines work on Windows. Even Linux virtual machines use dynamic memory. You assign a minimum, maximum, and a startup value. When the machine needs more RAM, Windows give it to it. When it releases it, it's available for other purposes.

When running no containers? I've found that it's a problem when one is running (the solution to that is here[1]), but I've not experienced it when nothing is running.

[1] https://blog.simonpeterdebbarma.com/2020-04-memory-and-wsl/

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