Windows Server 2019 Performance Benchmarked Against Linux On An Intel Xeon Server

SQLite performance on Windows Server remained slower than Linux and in fact slowed down further on Windows Server 2019. Windows Server 2019 with WSL to no surprise was by far the slowest as the poor I/O capabilities at this point remains the biggest bottleneck for the Windows Subsystem for Linux. Clear Linux meanwhile had a very narrow first place finish compared to the other distributions. CentOS 7 and Fedora Server 29, both on XFS, had the slowest performance while the XFS+Btrfs openSUSE Leap configuration came in on par with the other EXT4-default Linux distributions.

The random read performance via FIO was the highest with Windows Server 2019 followed by Windows Server 2016 and then Clear Linux.

But when it came to 4K random writes, Debian 9.6 was the fastest while Windows Server was the slowest. (WSL doesn't work out with the AIO tests under FIO.)

Under the IOzone disk benchmark, the XFS-based openSUSE Leap and CentOS 7 were the fastest followed by Windows Server and then the other Linux distributions.