Windows 10 WSL vs. Linux Performance For Early 2018

The Java JMH benchmark just was working on Ubuntu, but between those tested configurations, the Java performance was about the same.

With the Sunflow rendering benchmark, another Java case, the performance was similar on all tested platforms.

For the PHP language performance benchmark, the Docker and WSL performance tended to be close behind the bare metal results while VirtualBox was significantly slower.

Overall, Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) continues to perform admirably for those needing Linux support from a Windows 10 system. The big caveat remains with much slower I/O performance, but it will be interesting to see how far Microsoft can push its performance this year. Docker works better if your workloads are I/O heavy while VirtualBox can deliver faster I/O in some scenarios but tends to be measurably slower in threaded workloads. WSL generally strikes a nice balance of performance and support while being very easy to deploy.