Folks, I have a node.js script running on my Windows machine that uses the dockerode npm package to talk to docker on said box and starts and kills docker containers.

However, after the containers have been killed off, docker still holds on to the memory that it blocked for those containers and this means downstream processes fail due to lack of RAM.

To counter this, I have powershell scripts to start docker desktop and to kill docker desktop.

All of this is a horrid experience.

On my Mac, I just use Colima with Portainer and couldn’t be happier.

I’ve explored some options to replace Docker Desktop and it seems Rancher Desktop is a drop-in replacement for Docker Desktop, including the docker remote API.

1. Is this true? Is Rancher Desktop that good of a drop-in replacement?
2. Does Rancher Desktop better manage RAM for containers that have been killed off? Or does it do the same thing as Docker Desktop and hold on to the RAM?

Are there other options which I’m not thinking of which might solve my problems? I’ve seen a few alternatives but haven’t tried them yet - moby,
containerd,
podman

I don’t actually need the Docker Desktop interface. So pure CLI docker would also just work. How are you all running pure docker on Windows boxes?