The Performance Of Ubuntu Software Running On Windows 10 With The New Linux Subsystem

Windows 10 came in first when it came to running the C-Ray multi-threaded ray-tracer, which is using pthreads and much better performance showing than the earlier OpenMP results.

Windows 10 was much slower at building PHP within the Ubuntu environment than when running Ubuntu 14.04 bare metal.

Lastly were the Redis benchmarks where Ubuntu on Windows 10 really struggled.

From the benchmarks carried out so far with Ubuntu on Windows 10, the performance is surprisingly quite good. The only big difference in performance based upon our initial tests seem to be in areas when dealing with file-system / disk performance: Redis, CompileBench, PHP compilation, and similar workloads were much slower than an actual Ubuntu 14.04 LTS installation. When it comes to CPU bound workloads, the Windows 10 Linux subsystem kicked into gear and was delivering promising results for this developer feature that's currently only enabled to Windows Insider members. There were a few exceptions where the performance regressed like with the OpenMP-using GraphicsMagick, but overall the results ended up being better than anticipated.

As the LXcore / Linux subsystem for Windows continues to mature, I'll be back with some more benchmarks and from different systems. I may also experiment with running an X Server on Windows for being able to carry out some interesting graphical benchmarks. If you find all of these tests interesting and missed out on last week's call for help when suffering burn out, please help in ensuring our public benchmarks are able to continue by joining Phoronix Premium or making a tip. Thanks for your support and if any Phoronix Premium members have any other Ubuntu on Windows test requests to please let me know.