Ubuntu 20.04 vs. Windows 10 WSL/WSL2 Performance In 170+ Benchmarks

Written by Michael Larabel in Operating Systems on 24 June 2020 at 09:16 AM EDT. Page 3 of 8. 16 Comments.
Threadripper 3970X Ubuntu 20.04 LTS vs. Windows WSL/WSL2
Threadripper 3970X Ubuntu 20.04 LTS vs. Windows WSL/WSL2
Threadripper 3970X Ubuntu 20.04 LTS vs. Windows WSL/WSL2
Threadripper 3970X Ubuntu 20.04 LTS vs. Windows WSL/WSL2

For some workloads, Windows 10 WSL2 still has a ways to go in closing the gap fully with bare metal Ubuntu performance.

Threadripper 3970X Ubuntu 20.04 LTS vs. Windows WSL/WSL2
Threadripper 3970X Ubuntu 20.04 LTS vs. Windows WSL/WSL2
Threadripper 3970X Ubuntu 20.04 LTS vs. Windows WSL/WSL2

Interestingly in some cases like Google's libgav1 AV1 encoder, WSL/WSL2 is noticeably faster than Ubuntu 20.04 itself.

Threadripper 3970X Ubuntu 20.04 LTS vs. Windows WSL/WSL2
Threadripper 3970X Ubuntu 20.04 LTS vs. Windows WSL/WSL2

In some of the Java tests as well, the WSL2 performance was faster than bare metal Ubuntu, possibly due to better power management / clock behavior on Windows 10 compared to Ubuntu Linux with CPUfreq.

Threadripper 3970X Ubuntu 20.04 LTS vs. Windows WSL/WSL2
Threadripper 3970X Ubuntu 20.04 LTS vs. Windows WSL/WSL2

Commonly in the crypto tests is the same performance.

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