Benchmarking Ubuntu 18.04 On Windows Subsystem for Linux: WSL Leading Bare Linux In More Tests

To no surprise, PostgreSQL is much slower on WSL due to the I/O performance hit still being there with this latest Windows 10 update.

The Python performance measured by PyBench saw Windows 10 April 2018 Update with the Ubuntu 18.04 WSL being slightly faster than bare metal Ubuntu 18.04.

PHP performance is much faster on Ubuntu 18.04 than 16.04 due to going from PHP 7.0 to PHP 7.2.

The time needed to run some command Git commands took significantly longer with WSL due to the I/O overhead.

The Numpy performance was the fastest on Ubuntu 18.04 with WSL rather than bare metal.

It was a similar story with SciKit-Learn actually being the fastest with Ubuntu 18.04 running inside WSL.

The I/O performance of Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) remains a big problem for any storage intensive workloads, but the performance outside of that remains quite good for this layer allowing Linux binaries to run atop Windows 10. While we didn't compare the Windows 10 April 2018 Update to earlier Windows 10 builds directly, if anything it looks like the latest WSL performance is even stronger than our past rounds of CPU benchmarks on WSL. In a number of these benchmarks, Ubuntu 18.04 under WSL was faster than the bare-metal/native Ubuntu 18.04 installation itself, at least on this high-end Intel Core i9 system. More Windows 10 vs. Linux benchmarks are coming on Phoronix; as always if you appreciate my daily benchmark, consider showing your support by going premium.