I have been doing some web development work on this Windows laptop with WSL for close to 1.5 years now. I haven’t had many issues until last week.
I was away for 4 weeks, and basically didn’t open any of my projects during that time. So, I did not run WSL2 during that time.
When I got back, running my projects or using WSL2 has been VERY sluggish, noticed in various ways – opening a new ubuntu terminal (can take around 20-25 seconds), git pull commands taking minutes, tunneling into databases and requests regularly timing out, running my projects, VSCode extensions being very slows, showing data on my screen… to even affect my Windows side of things: browser result, etc…
I have not downloaded anything since, but updated my VSCode, so I don’t know why this has been happening.
I’m allocating 26Gb/32Gb of RAM and 6 cores to this subsystem, so I don’t understand how things just end up being so slow.
I just don’t know how to troubleshoot this very well — I’ve followed AI recommendations, looked into the DNS, my internet connection (which I don’t think is the culprit — but could it be, for those regular connections time-outs? When using without it running, I wouldn’t notice my internet timing out for example.), but still cannot pinpoint exactly the issue.
So I’m hesitating to remove the whole thing entirely.
Would any of you know what I could look into more specifically to troubleshoot the issue further?
PS: I’m not working inside the /mnt/ folder, just the /home one.
Extra notes: Things I have tried and looked into so far:
- Ping tests (inside and outside WSL2) – irregular results, especially in WSL2;
- Traceroute (inside WSL2) ; traceroute github.com → first hops okay, many later hops timed out.
→ Normal for some routers, but still confirms high latency. - Traceroute (in Windows PowerShell) tracert github.com → normal latency (≈80–90 ms), only some hops timing out (expected).
- Updating all packages inside Ubuntu (apt update && apt upgrade && apt dist-upgrade).
- Restarting WSL2 (wsl –shutdown) and the whole system multiple times.
- Tried fixing DNS (/etc/resolv.conf).
- Modifying .wslconfig
- Ran speedtests; irregular, but hard to put as a culprit.
