Evaggelos Balaskas - System Engineer

In WSLv2 there is a way to limit the resources of your linux distro (cpu/memory) to have a better performance on you win10.

To give you an example, this is how it starts on my HP-G5

~$ free -m
               total        used        free      shared  buffcache   available
Mem:           12659          68       12555           0          34       12425
Swap:           4096           0        4096

~$ grep -Ec proc /proc/cpuinfo
8

8 CPU threads, 12G

wslconfig

To define your specs, open cmd and change to your user profile directory

~> cd %UserProfile%

Verify that your WSL distros are stopped:

~> wsl.exe -l -v
  NAME            STATE           VERSION
* Archlinux       Running         2
  Ubuntu-20.04    Stopped         1

~> wsl.exe -t Archlinux -v

~> wsl.exe -l -v
  NAME            STATE           VERSION
* Archlinux       Stopped         2
  Ubuntu-20.04    Stopped         1

and terminate wsl

~> wsl.exe --shutdown

Create a new (or edit your previous) wsl config file

~> notepad.exe .wslconfig

My current setup is

~> type .wslconfig

[wsl2]
memory=4GB   # Limits VM memory in WSL 2 to 4 GB
processors=2 # Makes the WSL 2 VM use two virtual processors
swap=2GB     # How much swap space to add to the WSL2 VM. 0 for no swap file.
swapFile=C:\wsl2-swap.vhdx

as you can see, I want 4GB of RAM and 2 CPU , but also I want a 2GB swap file.

Edit this file according to your needs. The full settings can be found here wsl/wsl-config.

Reminder: you have to shutdown WSL

wsl.exe --shutdown

WSLv2 Limited

Now start your fav linux distro and verify

~$ grep -Ec proc /proc/cpuinfo
2

~$ grep -Ei MemTotal /proc/meminfo
MemTotal:        4028776 kB

~$ free
               total        used        free      shared  buffcache   available
Mem:         4028776       46348     3947056          64       35372     3848616
Swap:        2097152           0     2097152

that’s it !