Initial Benchmarks Of Microsoft's WSL2 - Windows Subsystem For Linux 2 On Windows 10 Is A Mixed Bag

When starting off with some synthetic I/O benchmarks, we see that indeed Ubuntu on WSL2 is performing much better than the original Windows Subsystem for Linux implementation. I/O was the main bottleneck of WSL1 with the CPU/system performance generally being quite good.

With WSL2, the I/O performance is much closer to the bare metal Ubuntu 18.04 and Clear Linux installations.

In tests like the Golang HTTP performance, the Hyper-V powered WSL2 was also performing better though in this particular case well behind the bare Linux platforms.

But in more of the compute-focused Golang benchmarks, we noticed WSL2 beginning to fall behind WSL1.

In fact, when moving to the CPU/system benchmarks, we noticed WSL2 now performing not nearly as well as WSL1.