WSL 2 Docker running slow

Yesterday I discovered my new Alpine Linux WordPress container had terrible latency when loading any pages.

Running docker stats I could see the issue was not related to resources.

A google search brought up this issue on the WSL GitHub project.

It turns out there are very low throughput speeds when accessing the Windows file system in a WSL container. This is exactly what I was doing, hosting my WordPress files on the Windows file system instead of in WSL’s file system.

The Resolution

There are two ways to resolve this:

1. User COPY in your docker file to copy your needed files into the container
2. Copy your files you are accessing into WSL’s file system and point your container their instead