Regarding WSL Network and Docker Memory Consumption Following Windows Update

Question

I performed a Windows Update and upgraded to 24H2. At that time, communication between the host, WSL, and Docker started showing what appears to be IPv6 traffic. It normally uses IPv4. Also, when creating images and containers in Docker, it now consumes about 20GB of memory. Why is this happening?

Answer 1

Hi, I understand how unexpected changes like this can catch you off guard.

After the 24H2 update, WSL introduced mirrored networking, which enables IPv6 by default, so apps inside WSL and Docker may now prefer IPv6 even if you were using IPv4 before.

On top of that, WSL2 dynamically allocates memory for its virtual machine and doesn’t release it until you shut it down, so when Docker builds large images, it can easily spike to 20GB or more.

A quick way to manage this is to set limits in your .wslconfig file, for example, cap memory at 6GB and restart WSL with wsl --shutdown.

Also, check your Docker Desktop version because some recent builds have memory leak issues; downgrading can help.

Can you confirm if you’re using Docker Desktop with WSL2 integration and whether you’ve set any resource limits before?

Regards,

Aron