Windows Server 2019 vs. Linux vs. FreeBSD Performance On A 2P EPYC Server

With the OSBench micro-benchmarks, file creation performance on Windows remains much slower than on the other operating systems tested.

Thread creation is slower on Windows but not nearly as slow as we found it for FreeBSD 12.0.

PyBench would only run under WSL but pleasantly the Windows Subsystem for Linux did deliver very good performance for this Python benchmark.

The PHP performance on Windows remains quite slow but at least ahead of CentOS 7.6 with its default PHP5 environment. The Windows Server 2019 PHP 7.2 performance came in a bit behind FreeBSD 12.0 while with WSL the performance managed to match the Linux distributions with this synthetic PHP language benchmark.

Of 46 benchmarks carried out on this dual AMD EPYC server, it was quite a diverse mix for the operating systems delivering the best performance. Clear Linux had the most wins at 26% but it also had a number of losses, particularly around the I/O performance on this AMD server. Coming in second was Ubuntu 18.10 with eight wins (17%) followed by CentOS 7.6 and openSUSE Tumbleweed each with seven wins. FreeBSD 12.0 meanwhile had five wins while Windows Server 2019 had three wins. But depending upon the workload, Microsoft Windows Server 2019 was able to compete with at least some of the Linux distributions tested, just generally not the fastest. It was a surprisingly good showing out of Windows Server on a 64-core / 128-thread server though will be interesting to see up next how the performance of Windows Server 2019 versus Linux is on an Intel Xeon server -- those results should be out in the days ahead.