15-Way Linux Distribution / Operating System Comparison, Including Windows 10 & WSL

First up was SQLite for some I/O testing with this widely-used, cross-platform embedded database library. The Linux performance was much faster than Windows 10 on NTFS but to no surprise by far the slowest configurations tested were using Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) where the I/O performance struggles a great deal but Microsoft developers are working on increasing the WSL I/O storage potential. Of the Linux distributions tested, openSUSE Tumbleweed with its XFS + mq-deadline configuration was the fastest with this Intel NVMe SSD device while Solus happened to be the slowest bare-metal Linux distribution tested.

When testing FIO on the Linux distributions, Intel's Clear Linux by far was the fastest in sequential read performance over the other Linux distributions while Debian 9.4 was very slow.

With FIO sequential writes it was another case of Clear Linux being the fastest while Debian 9.4 was by far the slowest.

While under the FS-Mark benchmarks, Clear Linux still won but by a narrower lead while Debian 9.4 popped into a second place spot. Antergos happened to be the slowest but there was high variation on its runs.

With Compile Bench, ignoring the terribly slow WSL results, Clear Linux was again the fastest with its EXT4 + mq-deadline configuration for this NVMe solid-state storage setup but most of the Linux distributions were not far behind. CentOS, openSUSE, and Fedora Workstation were a great deal slower though than the other Linux distributions tested.