Today Microsoft announced the
new WSL2
(Windows Subsystem for Linux), which will be shipped later this year. It
supposed to be 20 times faster than the current WSL. I have used WSL for about
one year and jumped back to Linux due to the performance issue of the former
one. The WSL is definitive faster than Cygwin, but it is unusable for a few
tasks. Here is an example for the performance of WSL(1), Cygwin and the
bare-bone system on the generation of this website at current status.
This static site is generated by self-made bash scripts. The scripts invoke
each other recursively (thus, many forks). The process involves plenty file
test commands (querying the file system attributes) and generates a lot of
temporary and output files (heavy IO of tiny files). This will be a critical
performance benchmark for WSL and Cygwin. The benchmarks are performed on the
same laptop with dual booting into Win 10 and Fedora 29.
Linux Native
real 0m2.462s
user 0m1.059s
sys 0m1.679s
Cygwin 3
real 1m19.374s
user 0m9.304s
sys 0m32.134s
Cygwin 3,
root excluded
from antivirus
real 1m16.906s
user 0m7.852s
sys 0m28.655s
Cygwin 3,
antivirus disabled
real 1m9.040s
user 0m7.500s
sys 0m24.274s
WSL at /mnt/c
real 0m22.634s
user 0m1.203s
sys 0m12.453s
WSL at /home
real 0m25.646s
user 0m1.125s
sys 0m14.594s
WSL at /mnt/c,
antivirus disabled
real 0m13.488s
user 0m1.156s
sys 0m12.109s
WSL at /home,
antivirus disabled
real 0m14.374s
user 0m1.063s
sys 0m13.406s
Win10 1809
Hyper-V gen2
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
real 0m1.869s
user 0m1.725s
sys 0m0.497s
The performances of both emulators are unacceptable for this task, even if the
Microsoft antivirus software is turned off. Let us look forward to the 20
times performance improvement in the coming WSL2.
Edit 2019-05-30: Add Hyper-V result
