Windows Subsystem For Linux Performance At The End Of 2019
Himeno is one of the heavy workloads where the bare metal Ubuntu performance was still the best.
Windows 10 19008 shows another sizable improvement compared to the older 18362 build.
Code compilation remains slow on WSL due to the I/O bottleneck but is at least faster with WSL2 due to the more traditional VM type approach.
Building LLVM under WSL was faster than building LLVM for Windows on Windows.
Many different workloads were tested given the diverse Phoronix audience...
With Blender the WSL/WSL2 performance is comparable to the raw Linux performance.
While a very diverse range of tests were carried out, if taking the geometric mean across all tests that ran successfully on the seven different operating system configurations, this is how the positioning looks. Windows 10 Build 19008 performed better in general than the Build 18362 started off with while the WSL performance itself didn't change much. WSL2 did perform slightly better under WSL namely due to performing much better in the workloads with heavy I/O or network activity. On this particular Core i9 7960X setup, running Ubuntu Linux though was still about 27% faster overall than the fastest Windows configuration. Those interested can dig through more of these Windows / WSL / Linux benchmarks via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.
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