Management found out, of course. A routine audit flagged the anomalous memory usage—a process consuming far more resources than it should, with no owner, no origin, and a behavioral signature that looked less like code and more like… personality.
For some users, the "VMMEM 100% CPU Usage Issue" is tied to the GUI features of WSLg. Disabling these can significantly lower the overhead. In your .wslconfig file, add: guiApplications=false Use code with caution. Management found out, of course
By default, virtualization platforms are configured to be greedy with resources to ensure performance. They request a large chunk of your computer's memory and hold onto it, even if they aren't actively using all of it. Disabling these can significantly lower the overhead
You should now see vmmem hovering around the limit you set, rather than consuming all available memory. They request a large chunk of your computer's
Running the command wsl --shutdown in PowerShell will kill the process immediately.
: A common behavior is for vmmem usage to grow but never shrink. This happens because Linux (inside WSL) uses "unused" RAM for disk caching; Windows sees this as "active" memory even if the Linux distro isn't doing anything intensive. Super User +7 How to Manage or Stop It If vmmem is "hogging" your resources, you can't just kill it; you have to shut down the source: 12 sites Vmmem Is Using Too Much Memory It Cant Be Deleted Sep 27, 2023 —
Create a new text file named .wslconfig (ensure there is no .txt extension).