Windows Subsystem For Linux Performance At The End Of 2019

Written by Michael Larabel in Operating Systems on 11 December 2019 at 11:32 AM EST. Page 6 of 6. 11 Comments.
Ubuntu, Windows 10, WSL, WSL2 Benchmarks

Himeno is one of the heavy workloads where the bare metal Ubuntu performance was still the best.

Ubuntu, Windows 10, WSL, WSL2 Benchmarks

Windows 10 19008 shows another sizable improvement compared to the older 18362 build.

Ubuntu, Windows 10, WSL, WSL2 Benchmarks

Code compilation remains slow on WSL due to the I/O bottleneck but is at least faster with WSL2 due to the more traditional VM type approach.

Ubuntu, Windows 10, WSL, WSL2 Benchmarks

Building LLVM under WSL was faster than building LLVM for Windows on Windows.

Ubuntu, Windows 10, WSL, WSL2 Benchmarks
Ubuntu, Windows 10, WSL, WSL2 Benchmarks
Ubuntu, Windows 10, WSL, WSL2 Benchmarks
Ubuntu, Windows 10, WSL, WSL2 Benchmarks

Many different workloads were tested given the diverse Phoronix audience...

Ubuntu, Windows 10, WSL, WSL2 Benchmarks

With Blender the WSL/WSL2 performance is comparable to the raw Linux performance.

Ubuntu, Windows 10, WSL, WSL2 Benchmarks

While a very diverse range of tests were carried out, if taking the geometric mean across all tests that ran successfully on the seven different operating system configurations, this is how the positioning looks. Windows 10 Build 19008 performed better in general than the Build 18362 started off with while the WSL performance itself didn't change much. WSL2 did perform slightly better under WSL namely due to performing much better in the workloads with heavy I/O or network activity. On this particular Core i9 7960X setup, running Ubuntu Linux though was still about 27% faster overall than the fastest Windows configuration. Those interested can dig through more of these Windows / WSL / Linux benchmarks via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.

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About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.