Ubuntu 14.04/16.04 vs. Ubuntu Bash On Windows 10 Anniversary Performance

First up was the SQLite embedded database benchmark. The out-of-the-box Ubuntu/Bash on Windows performance was quite slow, but when switching that 14.04 environment to 16.04 LTS, the performance was much faster. However, for this disk-heavy workload the native Ubuntu Linux installations were almost twice as fast as relying upon the Windows Subsystem for Linux.

The CompileBench test profile as additional disk-focused workloads show that this is the particular subsystem really straining the Ubuntu performance atop Windows 10 with it being up to multiple times slower.

Next up were some basic system memory speed tests with Stream.

Strangely, the Stream memory benchmarks show better performance with Ubuntu on Windows than Ubuntu itself! This happened on both the 14.04 and 16.04 based environments that the Windows results came out faster.