WLinux & WLinux Enterprise Benchmarks, The Linux Distributions Built For Windows 10 WSL

In our benchmarking of Windows 10 WSL over the past 2+ years, the main limitation of this platform for offering Linux binary compatibility has been the I/O performance... It's generally atrocious, even with Windows 10 I/O performance usually not being as good as Linux atop modern file-systems. As shown by this SQLite embedded database library test, all of the tested Linux distributions are a great deal slower than the native Windows 10 performance. There isn't anything the Linux distributions themselves can do but is low-level storage work that is still being carried out by Microsoft developers in order to hopefully provide less I/O overhead.

Between distributions on WSL for I/O heavy tasks, there doesn't tend to be much difference in performance due to being bottlenecked within the Windows 10 kernel.

But when it comes to scientific workloads and other CPU heavy tasks, depending upon the particular software, sometimes it can even be faster than Windows 10 itself outside of WSL.

With the HMMer molecular biology workload, WLinux and Ubuntu 18.04 were faster than the three other WSL Linux distributions, likely due to the newer compiler/packages than the other three.

The Crafty chess benchmark was effectively the same across the board.

x264 video encoding remains the fastest on Windows 10 itself and in fact ran into packaging issues with the WSL distributions.