Using W10Privacy To Boost Ubuntu WSL Performance On Windows 10

[kohlerm]

Seems mostly IO, so it's indexing or some shit. Not new, not windows-dependent.

Windows even with indexing turned off for me (Java, and node.js based builds) was always significantly slower than Linux running in a VM (VirtualBox or VMWare no big difference).
We are talking about a 2x to 3x performance difference .
So Windows has never been exactly stellar with regards to I/O performance for typical developer tasks. But WSL I/O is an order of magnitude slower, and also WSL works IMHO better than expected (including full Linux desktops) this make it quite useless for a lot of developers IMHO. So if Windows can be tuned to come much closer in performance WSL could become a good alternative to Linux VMs. I would also be interested to learn what exactly needs to be changed.
I also personally would really mind if it would be possible to create a disk on WSL using a native Linux Filesystem even if that means it would not be shared with windows.

[Royi]

"Changed some options, except I didn't press some other buttons" isn't that helpful, especially from you as a champion of reproducible testing.

The easiest way to derive knowledge here is to solely test the most dramatically affected single test with different configurations to see what actually triggers this enormous performance increase.

I would also like to point out that PowerShell scripts like https://github.com/Disassembler0/Win...l-Setup-Script , https://github.com/W4RH4WK/Debloat-Windows-10 , https://gist.github.com/alirobe/7f3b34ad89a159e6daa1 (just some of many) are very customizable and again in the spirit of reproducibility.

I hope once the 'culprits' of reduced WSL (and general Win10 I/O) performance are found, you will do us the service of listing Win 10 as well as tweaked/debloated Win 10 in future benchmarks. Thanks.

Are there script to optimize the performance of Windows 10?

[gmturner]

In recent (1803+) versions of windows, Defender has changed. First, it can no longer be completely disabled. Even if you turn it "off" it is still apparently running somewhere in the background doing detections -- as evidenced by notifications to the effect of "Windows detected something it didn't like on your system, but since you told me not to do anything about that, I'll just tell Microsoft about what was found, leaving it intact." Second, it has acquired several new heuristic detection mechanisms which are mostly enabled by default. I think those changes are sufficiently new that nobody has done any careful benchmarking on them, but it's easy to see how heuristic mechanisms could potentially be far more costly than blacklist-based mechanisms.

MSMG Toolkit can modify windows installation media so as to purportedly strip out Defender from the OS entirely. This has a tendency to break things, but the author seems to be fighting a mostly-successful war of attrition against most major breakages. So, in effect, it allows a system administrator to create a Defender-free Windows installation that will work well, but probably fail to absorb the next major update to Windows from Windows Update.

At that point, the Administrator can hope to create a new customized Windows installation media against the latest release, and do an upgrade to that... it's a lot of extra work to keep doing this, obviously, but if you really dislike Windows Defender, maybe it's worth it. I've been kind-of on the fence, myself, but Defender seems to get more and more intrusive and annoying over time...

[sireangelus]

In recent (1803+) versions of windows, Defender has changed. First, it can no longer be completely disabled. Even if you turn it "off" it is still apparently running somewhere in the background doing detections -- as evidenced by notifications to the effect of "Windows detected something it didn't like on your system, but since you told me not to do anything about that, I'll just tell Microsoft about what was found, leaving it intact." Second, it has acquired several new heuristic detection mechanisms which are mostly enabled by default. I think those changes are sufficiently new that nobody has done any careful benchmarking on them, but it's easy to see how heuristic mechanisms could potentially be far more costly than blacklist-based mechanisms.

MSMG Toolkit can modify windows installation media so as to purportedly strip out Defender from the OS entirely. This has a tendency to break things, but the author seems to be fighting a mostly-successful war of attrition against most major breakages. So, in effect, it allows a system administrator to create a Defender-free Windows installation that will work well, but probably fail to absorb the next major update to Windows from Windows Update.

At that point, the Administrator can hope to create a new customized Windows installation media against the latest release, and do an upgrade to that... it's a lot of extra work to keep doing this, obviously, but if you really dislike Windows Defender, maybe it's worth it. I've been kind-of on the fence, myself, but Defender seems to get more and more intrusive and annoying over time...

you need to differentiate between defender and smart screen, they are being merged.

On windows server you can uninstall defender though. That is why i'm running windows server 2016 on my desktop nstead of win10