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

When breaking it down to a per-test-profile basis, here is a look from the tests with the largest spread to the least spread.

Of the 172 tests, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS bare metal was in first place 61% of the time to WSL2 coming in first 20% of the time and WSL in first 18% of the time.

If taking the geometric mean of all 172 tests on this AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X workstation, using WSL2 yielded about 87% of the performance of running bare metal Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on the same hardware. WSL2 overall is in much better shape than WSL due to addressing the I/O bottleneck but as shown with these tests there are some cases where the former is faster than WSL2. WSL2 overall though was about 24% faster than WSL1.

While many more tests were run in this article compared to last week's WSL/WSL2 benchmark comparison with the Intel Core i9 10900K, the outcome is fairly similar. In that article last week with just 69 benchmarks, Ubuntu 20.04 did win 60% of the tests. But more importantly on the geometric mean it showed WSL2 about 21% faster than WSL1 while WSL2 was running at around 92% the speed of bare metal Ubuntu. This jives with additional testing I have done as well where roughly on the latest Windows 10 builds generally I would sum it up as WSL2 offering roughly 90% the performance of Ubuntu itself. But depending upon the workloads most important to you it can be almost the same performance or in select cases even faster with Windows Subsystem for Linux. Thus check out all the results on OpenBenchmarking.org for digging deeper into the workloads most important for your purposes.