Microsoft Still Working To Squeeze More I/O Performance Out Of WSL / Bash For Windows

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Microsoft Still Working To Squeeze More I/O Performance Out Of WSL / Bash For Windows

Windows Subsystem for Linux, a.k.a. WSL or "Bash for Windows", has been an interesting creature out of Microsoft for running Linux binaries on Windows 10 and more recently Windows Server. In our benchmarks WSL has generally been quite performant but the area where it struggles is I/O / storage performance...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Microsoft-Still-WSL-IO-Tuning

[FishB8]

They really need to find a fix for directory traversal as well. "/path/to/softlink-dir/../" goes to the parent of the directory that softlink-dir points to, rather than to the parent directory of the softlink-dir. Has to do with how underlying NTFS deals with directory junctions.

[ElectricPrism]

Microsoft Still Working To Squeeze More I/O Performance Out Of WSL

Yeah no shit, Windows is slow as fuck at I/O operations compared to Linux & their Download speeds are utter shit too vs Linux.

But yeah, I actually hope they continue to suck and fail to deliver because it reflects their inability to produce a OS that can go toe to toe with open source.

Sure they might shove their product down more peoples throats, but at the end of the day Windows is inferior trash.

[oleid]

Hope they implement a proper X server next and provide a way to disable the win32 and win64 subsystem.

[blacknova]

They should for start squeeze more IO performance for native Windows applications - file access speed is abysmal, once application or build process start to use large number of files, its performance degrade quickly.
I have maven project with around 4300 classes, build on windows can take up to 2 minutes, on linux on the same machine - up to 45 seconds.
Both systems and build files are on Samsung 850 pro ssd disks.
Funny fact windows build performed on HDD lasts the same time as build on SSD.
Another funny fact builds of same project on windows on different machines takes roughly the same amount of time - on Ryzen 1700, on HP 8770 laptop with i7-3620hq and on AMD FX8370.

[brrrrttttt]

Is WSL as slow as Windows at launching processes? Compiling a large project natively on Windows is painful, as in 4x slower than Linux or macOS, and it seems to mostly be due to the time it takes to start each compiler process.

[linuxgeex]

If you want good performance for WSL, create a partition to run WSL out of with System Restore, Indexing, and Compression disabled. Then it will be about 80% the speed of EXT4 on average.

[carewolf]

Is WSL as slow as Windows at launching processes? Compiling a large project natively on Windows is painful, as in 4x slower than Linux or macOS, and it seems to mostly be due to the time it takes to start each compiler process.

Linux or macOS? Compiling on macOS is two or three times slower than Linux. A colleague of mine even found building our project on a Linux VM running on mac was twice as fast as building it natively on mac.

[randomizer]

Linux or macOS? Compiling on macOS is two or three times slower than Linux. A colleague of mine even found building our project on a Linux VM running on mac was twice as fast as building it natively on mac.

You may find the same thing running a Linux VM on Windows. I ran the unit test suite for a web application (all Node stuff) in a VM with limited resources and it was 4-5x faster than on the Windows host. I think part of the problem is that Windows is a second class citizen for many open source projects (particularly developer-oriented ones), probably because the developers rarely run Windows themselves.

[Weasel]

Maybe it has to do with the fact that it's a micro-kernel design and requires more context switches doing many-file operations (not just reads and writes but also open and close).