rancher-desktop: Freeze after a few hours

Actual Behavior

Rancher Desktop silently freezes after a few hours of operation. The GUI is not exactly frozen - it is just extremely slow (draws/klicks take about 10 seconds each).

The only visible indicator is “Network” being “offline” at some point.

K8S might be still reachable through the API (k9s still works), but many bigger operations (helm) will just time out.

This might be related to #6057 , but in my case, a taskkill /F /T /IM "rancher desktop.exe" followed by a wsl --shutdown allows me to restart Rancher Desktop and continue working.

Steps to Reproduce

run Rancher Desktop for a few hours, observe “network: offline” - after a few minutes, you’ll wait for 10-20 seconds for any click on the GUI or Taskbar icon. Shutdown can be initiated, but will never complete.

Result

logs are unremarkable (to me). No errors that correspond to anything that might have happened after actually starting up the cluster.

Expected Behavior

no freeze

Additional Information

No response

Rancher Desktop Version

1.12.0 (but also happened on 1.11.x)

Rancher Desktop K8s Version

1.28.x

Which container engine are you using?

containerd (nerdctl)

What operating system are you using?

Windows

Operating System / Build Version

Windows 11 Pro 23H2 22631.3007

What CPU architecture are you using?

x64

Linux only: what package format did you use to install Rancher Desktop?

None

Windows User Only

FortiClient VPN is active during all of this. Split tunnel is active, Internet access is unrestricted.