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

It's nice the I/O is faster, but this new Hyper-V driven approach to WSL2 has unfortunately slowed down other areas of the performance...

Even with the better I/O of WSL2, the performance for running services like Apache or Nginx remain much lower than bare metal Ubuntu or Clear Linux.

At least running Git within Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 is no longer crazy slow.

While at first we were quite excited about the prospects of WSL2 when hearing it was going to address the I/O bottleneck that plagued WSL1, unfortunately, after testing we are not all that enthusiastic. At least for now, WSL2 seems to run into much lower performance in real CPU/system workloads compared to WSL1 while at least the I/O performance is in better standing. Hopefully Microsoft will work to better tune the performance of WSL2 moving forward -- keeping in mind this is still an insider preview build -- but for now we're thankful that they plan to at least maintain WSL1. More WSL2 benchmarks will be coming up shortly on Phoronix.