Dockerwsl taking too much space. Docker flooding syslog with run-docker-runtime logs. I reset Docket to Factory and still the CPU pegged at 80% or It was taking over 10 minutes to do a restore that would take about 5 seconds on my own machine. exe (Defender) process was scanning the dockerd. But. /. After some research I found a nice step-by-step instruction by Stephen Rees-Carter how to shrink the used space by wsl2: How to Shrink a WSL2 Virtual Disk A rough explanation: WSL2 runs the Linux kernel in a VM. I am still missing 30GB that I don't know how to get back. exe (Docker daemon). After you've removed the files from the VHDX, you're going to need to shrink the VHDX file too. I think this happens because windows allocates some space to the disk image of wsl. Commands below show that there is a serious mismatch between "official" image, It would be possible for Docker Desktop to manually provision the VHD with a user-configurable maximum size (at least on Windows Pro and higher), but WSL automatically # Space used = 22135MB $ ls -sk Docker. There should be a command to list and remove whatever artifacts are created as part of a “commit”. Kubernetes/Docker uses too much disk space. I cannot find it documented anywhere) limitation of disk space that can be used by all images and containers created on Docker I purged my data using docker desktop to reclaim space and I went up to 40GB. k. Removing the cruft from Docker Desktop doesn't help much though without the next step. 1889] WSL Version WSL 2 WSL 1 Kernel Version 5. Unfortunately, if you reclaim some space, i. 1 Repro Steps You simply need to build docker images several times. Hi, I’ve been using docker compose deployments on different servers. You can mount a bigger disk space It definitely gets worse the more times I build Docker images. When analysing the disk usage with du -sh most of the usage is located in var/lib/docker/overlay2, but the numbers do not add up. Ask Question Asked 9 months ago. Even after clearing deleting the files, the disk space remains occupied as it has been allocated to the disk image. I have tried the command: Optimize -VHD -Path Over time, Docker Desktop running on Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (a. As an emergency measure I pushed Ctrl-C. At the moment I'm using phpstorm, and did a dump/load of a database. I just have one problem and need some advice, for the past month docker has filled my C Drive through it’s WSL, and I cant seem to be able to get rid of that, I have cleared all images, volumes, containers and everything. Now my environment is running fine but the ext4. Any advice? I made a docker compose build command and it downloaded half of the internet, filling up my disk. That said, here are some measurements done on Windows 11 today: Short form: The WSL feature and kernel take between 100-200MB of space. Nothing seems to work. e. I ended up getting 50gb back. However, even after closing docker I have Docker Desktop v 4. The first step Sending build context to Docker daemon takes 16 GB of space; The step ADD . 19044. tried running: docker system prune --all Restarting the pc. Also, many times installing from pipenv takes time, especially locking. Here’s how you can do it: The file appears to be 512MB, but du (disk usage) shows that it really takes 0 on the disk. (Not really, but let's say that was too much for me). So what I think has happened that since I pushed Ctrl-C in panic, docker compose did not perform any sort of docker system prune, as every 'delete' (especially bulk delete as in this case) operation, is risky and may have unforeseen consequences. I assume that Docker is storing all the image and container files on my C:\\ drive or some alias to it - although I have yet to find where. CPU usage was 98%. vhdx -Mode Full. Let Luckily, you can reduce its size manually by calling this command in PowerShell (as Administrator): Optimize-VHD -Path c:\path\to\data. Even after deleting all the images and container, docker is not releasing the free disk space back to OS. On each of the server I have an issue where a single container is taking up all space over a long period of time (±1month). During our work, the size of the WSL file will become larger and larger. To reclaim the disk space, you have to try clean/purge data option from the GUI. vhdx and follow the wizard to increase it to whatever size you like. Deleting that file, though, will not recover the space in Windows (but will in Ubuntu). Over time, these things can take up a lot of space on your system, either locally or in CI. The hard disc image file on path C:\Users\me\AppData\Local\Docker\wsl\data is taking up 160 GB of disc space. I tried my best to confirm if I was saving some junk somewhere prompting this behaviour but cannot find it. Probably going to have to be a feature request to the Docker Desktop team and/or the WSL team. I was guessing whether move wsl to another, possibly bigger and empty partition. After WSL 2 integration, I am not able to find that option. Browse to C:\Users\[Your User]\AppData\Local\Docker\wsl\data Select ext4. 1 Distro Version Ubuntu-20. I installed docker on windows home which uses WSL2 as a backend. vhdx" -Mode Full, this will resize the vhdx images; I really like WSL/WSL2 in Windows - it provides a lot of features with minimal performance impact (WSL2) and I can still use Windows app. When is try to run sudo My laptop has only 147 GB of space and run Windows 10 as my C Drive. In this post, we'll look at the different Docker artifacts that can take up space on your system, how to clear them individually, and how to use docker system prune to clear Docker cache. 11. raw 22666720 Docker. There are ways to manually shrink it if needed to reclaim space on the Windows drive. Hot I observed the same issue: wsl2 got bigger and bigger and even when I deleted files inside of wsl2, I couldn't see the free space reflected on my host machine. To isolate the issue, run task manager while you're doing a very slow docker build. vhdx, and its the virtual disk that the Docker Desktop WSL2 instance uses. / (in an effort to see all disk space usage by Ubuntu) returns a size of ~39GB, and I am unable to find what's occupying the rest of the space. Docker Desktop for Windows uses WSL to manage all your images and container files and There are many ways to clean up the disk space used by Docker on WSL2. Note down the new size in MB. For those of you that run Docker Desktop on Windows with WSL2 integration, this is for you. For each type of object, Docker provides a prune command. Using du -hs --exclude mnt/ on path ~/. It Note that space, once consumed, is not automatically released. When I call docker build . I reset Docket to Factory and still the CPU pegged at 80% or Docker taking all space 100%. Docker persists build cache, containers, images, and volumes to disk. For instance, creating a 1GB file in WSL/Ubuntu will grow the size of the virtual disk image by 1GB. But now my disk image is Your post is a bit confusing, and I actually closed it as a duplicate before realizing that you aren't asking how to reclaim unused space, but rather it seems you are asking what is actually taking up the space in your WSL disk image in the first place. Windows hasn't fixed this problem yet, but Vmmem using too much memory is caused by WSL2 and Docker. Start Docker (may need to run wsl --start first) Docker takes a conservative approach to cleaning up unused objects (often referred to as "garbage collection"), such as images, containers, volumes, and networks. The containers are much lighter than equivalent VMs, but the containers are running in the WSL2 VM. That folder contains a few 30-40GB tar files. This can cause Docker to use extra disk space. I’m somewhat shocked that this user journey is even possible. It will happen even if we will decide to jump into Linux distribution and remove a lot of unnecessary files. Viewed 6k times 0 I started using Docker recently and Docker was taking up too much space even after i prune all the dangling containers and images. 0. This has a side benefit of removing all of my images and containers. /model takes 32 GB of space. There are ways to reclaim the space and move the storage to some other directory. Docker Desktop. It would be possible for Docker Desktop to manually provision the VHD with a user-configurable maximum size (at least on Windows Pro and higher), but WSL Reclaim Docker WSL Disk Space I ran out of system SSD disk space on my Win10 PC at home and tracked a large share of the usage to a vhdx virtual disk image file in a Docker Desktop folder. The hard disc image file on path C:\Users\me\AppData\Local\Docker\wsl\data is taking up 160 GB of disc space. These objects are generally not removed unless you explicitly ask Docker to do so. Open up the docker settings -> Resources -> Advanced and up the amount of Hard Drive space it can use under disk image size. Docker Desktop uses a VHDX file to store its items on and you'll only remove files from that virtual hard drive. It's resulting in build processes slowing down to somewhere between 1/10th and 1/50th the speed they run at when There are at least two directories where docker can fill up space. It's not just Docker, but WSL2 and the VM using too much memory. So I delete all of /nix. txt. After updating . The docker-desktop-data vhdx is normally in this location: Reclaim disk space by compacting the Docker Desktop WSL disk image. As in, my computer is I cannot find it documented anywhere) limitation of disk space that can be used by all images and containers created on Docker Desktop WSL2 Windows. You can see how much space the WSL2 virtual disk is actually taking by searching your drive for ext4 Which is much more than the 1GB limit that I set. I have a folder that contains code + weights of neural networks + annoy indices and takes approximately 16 GB. There are various suggestions you can find online, including lowering how much memory Docker uses, but I found that those didn't actually fix the problem. We’ll We'll go over how to regain lots of disk space by compacting the VM file that Docker Desktop creates. It's also very difficult to measure the exact disk space utilized by any given Windows feature since Windows is constantly consuming and releasing disk space for other purposes as well. wslconfig to be: [wsl2] memory=8GB swap=2000 processors=4 and then restarting Docker, the CPU consumption was still over 80% and there were 5 Docker Desktop processes (each taking 17-18%) in Windows Task Manager. Hit the subscribe button to receive more videos like this!REFERENCE LINKS----- Why is Ubuntu on WSL taking up so much space? The WSL2 virtual disk image that contains Ubuntu is a dynamic Hyper-V virtual disk. For setting memory allocation limits on containers in previous versions, I had option in Docker Desktop GUI under Settings->Resources->Advanced->Preferences to adjust memory and CPU allocation. Still the vhdx images are too big. You mention that your image is taking up ~40GB, and that it is showing 4% usage of approximately 1TB (the normal sparse size for a Version Microsoft Windows [Version 10. Only a "purge data" command on docker desktop does seem to do the trick. Step 2: Clean up the WSL installation for Docker Hi everyone, happy to see many people using and loving Docker as I do. I ran docker stop $(docker ps -aq) to kill all running containers (there were 12 - oops) which has improved the issue significantly. If I run docker image prune -a unnecessary images are purged, but the space is not reclaimed: I recently updated my Docker environment to run on WSL 2 on Windows. My As of July 2020, it’s easy to get in a situation where WSL 2 will eat up all of your disk space, use 80% of your memory and get poor file I/O performance when accessing mounted drives. Modified 8 months ago. This is why it requires user consent to proceed. WSL 2) may start to eat away at your hard drive space. I have my docker taking less than 2% cpu now. But my Ubuntu is already 60 GB so, am unsure how much time it will take to backup tar and how smooth it will be given that my C: drive is already full. Even with the file settings & multiple restarts after Docker Desktop has been running for a few days it will say in Task Manager that it’s using 6GBs but Resource Monitor will show Vmmem using as much as 18GBs. If I run docker image prune -a unnecessary images are purged, but the space is not reclaimed: ronald@Ronald:~/$ docker image prune -a WARNING! This will remove all Yes, Docker use /var/lib/docker folder to store the layers. docker xxx prune commands will clean up something unused, such as all stopped containers I notice too that memory tends to be used high, though I never run into memory issue. Docker Desktop creates the VHD that docker-desktop-data uses, but it probably relies on WSL to do so. Have you wondered where all your hard drive space is going? Have you seen that the folder c:\users\<yourname>\AppData\Local\Docker\WSL\Data is growing and never shrinking? Well in that folder sits a virtual hard disk called ext4. OFC it might come in handy at times but should be randomguy Asks: Docker taking up too much space I am using Docker on Windows with WSL 2 backend. raw # Discard the unused blocks on the file system $ docker run --privileged --pid=host docker/desktop-reclaim-space # Savings are Other answers address listing system memory usage and increasing the amount of Docker disk space in Docker Desktop: The docker system df command can be used to view reclaimable memory --Abishek_Jain. 10. In combination with Docker, it can handle a lot of things and it's much better for me than for example MacOS. vhdx" -Mode Full, this will resize the vhdx images; I ended up getting back 50GB of space after running these commands. --Nico Reducing the vdisk max size only limits the disk growing too large and wasting disk space on the host, but sparse vdisk makes that mostly unnecessary. It basically boils down to doing the following in powershell- It works OK normally, until I run out of disk space Even when the container is shut down and removed, I still have 95GB of data in c:\Users\me\AppData\Local\Temp\docker-index\sha256 . Not that very nice. 20: 13066: November 21, 2023 Disk space usage. When I run “docker commit ”, it fills up my hard drive with no way to clear it out. a. My C:\\ drive is running out of space so I want to force Docker to store the image and containers on my D:\\ drive. Docker container taking 27GB on disk while docker container ls --size only report 500MB. If I am low on disk space and use WSL2 to build a project that uses a few GB of RAM, this memory usage would also use similar amount of disk space on the host. I see that it is 251G. However, since doing this a process called vmmem seems to be consistently consuming a lot of computational resources. It will not take all that space up from your drive, it will increase as it need to. How do I do that? When I look in Settings, I Following the advice on How do I get back unused disk space from Ubuntu on WSL2? I set my WSL disk image to sparse with wsl --manage <distro> --set-sparse true. But it seems that even with all those commands, sometimes you need to start with a clean slate. It works OK normally, until I run out of disk space Even when the container is shut down and removed, I still have 95GB of data in c:\Users\me\AppData\Local\Temp\docker-index\sha256 . Above commenter is right, 4GB just isn't going to cut it. Here is how I was able to free up over Shrink your WSL2 Virtual Disks and Docker Images and Reclaim Disk Space. The VM is lightweight, but you're still running entire other operating systems within it and docker itself takes up memory and CPU. You need to compactify the disk image using what has been suggested here or here. Then I executed docker system prune to no avail, then Docker Desktop Disk space extension to no avail. Docker Desktop for Windows v2, which uses WSL2, stores all image and container files in a separate virtual volume (vhdx). Now any developer who uses many software as part of their development process would agree that this space is grossly inadequate. vhd file is still very large (~70 GB) while running du inside WSL reports only about 10 GB. 3: This occupies all my disk space and my task fails. 9. 0. Assuming you have a bigger disk partition on your computer, say /bigdisk, here are the possible solution: Temp dir Docker running on Ubuntu is taking 18G of disk space (on a partition of 20G), causing server crashes. When I look at process hadnles Its still being used by system which is not telling much. One problem I discovered last time is space consumed The good news is that resolving this memory consumption issue is straightforward. To my knowledge that in linux system swap space is the memory space which will be used when much more memory in the system are needed. Eventually, it frees 16 GB If Vmmem is using too much memory, here are some steps you can take to manage its resource usage: Adjust WSL Memory Allocation: If you're using WSL and Vmmem is consuming too much memory, you can adjust the memory allocation for your WSL instances. . I run all the prune commands and it reclaims 0B. The folder also contains a Dockerfile and a requirements. When I then try to delete the container I tried to commit, it cannot be done because my hard drive is full. Automating it and thus removing the need for the consent (with --force option) may cause harm to less aware Docker users. I am having issues with too much space utilized by docker and wsl2 *. Ever. vhdx in AppData\Local\Docker\wsl\data is still present and I can't remove it due to it still being used. I found that there is “undocumented” (i. LOCALAPPDATA\Docker\wsl\data\ext4. Docker taking too much space, even after removing all the images and containers. If I close Docker Desktop from the Task Tray Icon the RAM will go down to nothing. I Hi, I’ve been using docker compose deployments on different servers. vhdx images. So when you view the filesystem through the \\WSL$\ network share, it's simply showing the maximum possible size to which the virtual WSL2 disk can grow. This virtual hard disk file can automatically grow when it needs more space (to a certain limit). 102. I observed that docker even tends to use swap space. Docker Hard Disk Image File Being Too Large. Below is the summary of what I found. Vmmem Due to an increasing database size in the local docker environments in my work project, I have been attempting to increase the maximum size of the virtual disk space of WSL2 for Docker from 256Gb to 512Gb. 04 Other Software Docker Desktop: 4. by removing unused images, vhdx doesn't shrink automatically. I found out that the MsMgEng. Your Windows build number: 18917 What's wrong / what should be happening instead: WSL 2 starts using huge amounts of RAM after a while, just using it like normal. "P:\Users\your-username\AppData\Local\Docker\wsl\data\ext4. Will the disk size be reduced dynamically as I use my C:/ drive or do I have to manually reduce If you are troubled by that /var/lib/docker/overlay2 directory is taking too much space(use du command to check space usage), then the answer below may be suitable for you. Fortunately, there is a quick solution – we can use diskpart includes in Windows to reclaim some space. 1. Also, it will still be consuming space on I noticed that the space on the hard disk that docker WSL uses doesn't shrink. 0 running on Windows/10 home with WSL2. One of them is taking up disk space. 35. I seldom observe much swap usage in linux system. But the ext4. windows. vhdx" In my case docker is using up about 27GB of disk space in this file. bsh ewx kvwc shuwgvu bnj purng opkub csisb mhr mnvgyg