A Look At The Windows 10 October 2018 Update Performance With WSL

With the basic SQLite embedded database benchmark, we see I/O performance is still a huge trouble for WSL with the October 2018 Update... But it did come in as slightly faster than the pre-October update. This SQLite benchmark took about one minute to complete with Ubuntu 18.04 on WSL or about two seconds when bare metal. The Clear Linux performance was too fast that an accurate measurement couldn't be obtained for this test.

The CompileBench compile test also indicates the October update performing slightly better, but still a substantial improvement is needed to make the WSL performance close to that of the I/O capabilities of Linux running on the hardware itself.

Tinymembench shows the RAM performance under WSL cam be about the same speed as Ubuntu 18.04 itself.

The Rodinia scientific tests also performed close to the same under WSL as Ubuntu itself while Clear Linux in the Lava molecular dynamics benchmark was much faster than Ubuntu 18.04.1.

With the NAMD simulator, the performance was the same across the board.