The Performance Of Ubuntu Software Running On Windows 10 With The New Linux Subsystem

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The Performance Of Ubuntu Software Running On Windows 10 With The New Linux Subsystem

At the end of March was the surprising news about Microsoft bringing Bash and Ubuntu's user-space to Windows 10 via a new "Linux subsystem" for natively dealing with Linux ELF binaries atop Windows. Since last week the latest Windows Insider update now ships with said support for being able to run Bash and other Ubuntu user-space programs on Windows 10. I've been benchmarking the performance of Ubuntu/Linux software on Windows 10 and have some results to share comparing it to a clean Ubuntu installation.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=23044

[DIRT]

Looks fast. Wonder if it will it have ads since it is free?
Finally getting benchmarks with windows drivers quality is pretty cool.

[justmy2cents]

The only big difference in performance based upon our initial tests seem to be in areas when dealing with file-system / disk performance: Redis, CompileBench, PHP compilation, and similar workloads were much slower than an actual Ubuntu 14.04 LTS installation. When it comes to CPU bound workloads, the Windows 10 Linux subsystem kicked into gear and was delivering promising results for this developer feature that's currently only enabled to Windows Insider members.

except i don't know one single developer need that wouldn't be tied to disk/file system... unless times changed and now main focus of developers is converting mp3s

[Mystro256]

NTFS must be horrible, thank god for EXT4

[milkylainen]

NTFS is one of the biggest (on top of a rather long list) FUBARs in the NT-Kernel. It desperately needs to be fixed. Don't get me started on ReFS etc.
Microsoft should just adopt a real FS instead of the "not written here" mentality bs they keep on pushing.
Filesystems obviously aren't one of Microsofts fortes...

[ihatemichael]

How are they handling Linux permissions if NTFS doesn't support those?

[Kushan]

There's a lot more to those filesystem benchmarks beyond "EXT is better than NTFS". Circlejerking aside, assuming NTFS is slower than EXT4, it's not 10-100x slower as the benchmarks show. Most likely there's a translation layer to handle the differences between the two filesystems and that's what's holding up the show.

Hopefully later updates can improve upon this.

[Las_]

I... thought that Linux would blow it out of the water a bit. A bit disappointed.

[chithanh]

assuming NTFS is slower than EXT4, it's not 10-100x slower as the benchmarks show.

Actually, the difference in some cases can be an order of magnitude. This is not because of some translation layer, but instead of the design of filesystems in Windows.

git is another example of software that used the filesystem in a way that performed well on Linux but horribly on Windows. Workarounds have been implemented since to make it perform acceptably fast.

[torsionbar28]

Yes, but can I run it using WINE on an Ubuntu machine??