High resource use according to task manager when nothing is happening in wsl

[ajkessel]

Windows Version

10.0.19045.3803

WSL Version

2.1.0.0

Are you using WSL 1 or WSL 2?

• WSL 2
• WSL 1

Kernel Version

5.15.137.3-1

Distro Version

Ubuntu 23.04

Other Software

No response

Repro Steps

taskmgr often shows vmmem with "very high" power usage and 2GB of RAM when wsl is doing nothing -- no terminal window or application even open. When I run top in wsl, I don't see anything using significant amounts of RAM or CPU. echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches seems to free up some memory. I've tried adding autoMemoryReclaim=gradual to .wslconfig but I don't see it doing anything.

I'm often seeing wsl freeze/crash as indicated in #10378 , requiring reboot to fix (wsl --shutdown isn't enough), but I don't know if that's related to this overall resource issue or not.

This is on a 2023 top-end X1 Carbon, so it shouldn't be maxing out system resources so easily.

Expected Behavior

Normal/low RAM/CPU usage

Actual Behavior

High RAM/CPU usage

Diagnostic Logs

I could upload the output of collect-wsl-logs.ps1 if needed.

[github-actions]

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• WSL Becomes Non Responsive, Uses High Amounts Of CPU & Memory (#9429), similarity score: 0.75

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[OneBlue]

Thank you for reporting this @ajkessel.

Next time this reproduces, can you run:

wsl --debug-shell

And inside that shell, share the output of top ?

[ajkessel]

Is this what you're looking for?

Resource use is moderate when this was taken, but still higher than I would expect given that almost nothing is actually happening in wsl.

Does this mean it's actually trying to use more than 10GB of RAM?

[MKN-MCI]

I just experienced WSL hanging with a vmmem process hogging ~8GiB memory and ~80% CPU.

Happened during build of a C++ application using g++ in a VSCode Dev Container with code residing on the Windows filesystem accessed by WSL via the mounted path in /mnt/c.

In my situation all attempts to do anything with WSL hung, including wsl --debug-shell.

Killing it using taskkill /f /im wslservice.exe as directed here made the open shells terminate and I could start new ones:

[process exited with code 1 (0x00000001)]
You can now close this terminal with Ctrl+D, or press Enter to restart.

WSL versions:

c:\>wsl --version
WSL version: 2.0.9.0
Kernel version: 5.15.133.1-1
WSLg version: 1.0.59
MSRDC version: 1.2.4677
Direct3D version: 1.611.1-81528511
DXCore version: 10.0.25131.1002-220531-1700.rs-onecore-base2-hyp
Windows version: 10.0.19045.3930