nocache

Its page cache[0]. A similar thing happens with wsl2 on Windows[1]. The issue is the linux kernel running in the lima-vm thinks all the ram you give the VM is free to cache files on, it doesn't know there is a host OS that could also make use of that ram. So after loading up a ton of containers where each has its own OS dependencies that ends up being a lot of files the kernel keeps cached so long as nothing else needs the memory. There isn't really a fix besides right sizing the amount of ram you give the VM. Or I guess you could disable file caching but I wouldn't recommend it[2]. [0] https://www.linuxatemyram.com/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26897095 [2] https://github.com/Feh/nocache

nocache¹. It is LD_PRELOAD based so will only function within the normal limitations of that. It also comes with a couple of tools for examining and modifying a file's cache state, which makes it useful to judge its value in your environment. One of my biggest use cases for it is with soxi, which I use solely for playlist manipulation. I don't alias my source tree search tools, because invariably I'm going to want all that stuff in the cache anyway for builds and such. ¹ https://github.com/Feh/nocache

Also check https://github.com/Feh/nocache

Follow-up, for people who encounter this thread in the future: I did some more hunting and found `nocache` (https://github.com/Feh/nocache , though I installed it via the Ubuntu repositories) which does this by intercepting the open() system call and calling fadvise() immediately afterwards.

Take a look at https://github.com/Feh/nocache. It works effectively for reads. I don't know about writes.

For Linux, there is a program called nocache, which does something similar to this: https://github.com/Feh/nocache