My experience using docker on windows has been pretty awful, it would randomly become completely unresponsive, sometimes taking 100% CPU in the process. Couldn’t stop it without restarting my computer. Tried reinstalling and various things, still no help. Only found a GitHub issue with hundreds of comments but no working workarounds/solutions.
When it does work it still manages to feel… fragile, although maybe that’s just because of my experience with it breaking.
You can cap the amount of cpu/memory docker is allowed to use. That helps a lot for those issues in my experience, although it still takes somewhat beefy machines to run docker in wsl
When it happens docker+wsl become completely unresponsive anyway though. Stopping containers fails, after closing docker desktop wsl.exe--shutdown still doesn’t work, only thing I’ve managed to stop the CPU usage is killing a bunch of things through task manager. (IIRC I tried setting a cap while trying the hyper-v backend to see if it was a wsl specific problem, but it didn’t help, can’t fully remember though).
I found the same thing until I started strictly controlling the resources each container could consume, and also changing to a much beefier machine. Running a single project with a few images were fine, but more than that and the WSL connection would randomly crash or become unresponsive.
Databases in particular you need to watch: left unchecked they will absolutely hog RAM.
My experience using docker on windows has been pretty awful, it would randomly become completely unresponsive, sometimes taking 100% CPU in the process. Couldn’t stop it without restarting my computer. Tried reinstalling and various things, still no help. Only found a GitHub issue with hundreds of comments but no working workarounds/solutions.
When it does work it still manages to feel… fragile, although maybe that’s just because of my experience with it breaking.
You can cap the amount of cpu/memory docker is allowed to use. That helps a lot for those issues in my experience, although it still takes somewhat beefy machines to run docker in wsl
When it happens docker+wsl become completely unresponsive anyway though. Stopping containers fails, after closing docker desktop
wsl.exe --shutdownstill doesn’t work, only thing I’ve managed to stop the CPU usage is killing a bunch of things through task manager. (IIRC I tried setting a cap while trying the hyper-v backend to see if it was a wsl specific problem, but it didn’t help, can’t fully remember though).This is the issue that I think was closest to what I was seeing https://github.com/docker/for-win/issues/12968
My workaround has been to start using GitHub codespaces for most dev stuff, it’s worked quite nicely for the things I’m working on at the moment.
I found the same thing until I started strictly controlling the resources each container could consume, and also changing to a much beefier machine. Running a single project with a few images were fine, but more than that and the WSL connection would randomly crash or become unresponsive.
Databases in particular you need to watch: left unchecked they will absolutely hog RAM.