A Look At The Windows 10 October 2018 Update Performance With WSL

[steven36]

As the first of our Linux vs. Windows benchmarks coming around Microsoft's Windows 10 October 2018 Update, today we are exploring the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) performance to see if they have finally managed to improve the I/O performance for this Linux binary compatibility layer and how the WSL performs compared to Ubuntu and Clear Linux.

 

For those that have missed my previous rounds of Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) benchmarking, this Linux binary compatibility layer for Windows is surprisingly performant for most workloads... Microsoft all around has done a surprisingly good job on WSL with its support and performance. The big exception to the strong WSL performance though has been for I/O workloads struggling a great deal due to WSL needing to track the various meta-data separately, backing the I/O by their long-standing NTFS file-system, and other complications between Linux/Windows I/O handling. But they continue to express they are working on improving the I/O performance and as such I was anxious to see if there are any improvements with this October 2018 Update.

 

 

 

For some fresh benchmarks, I tested Windows 10 April 2018 Update against the latest Windows 10 October 2018 Update. The WSL image used was the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS stack available from the Windows Store in each case. Also, Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS was benchmarked when installed bare-metal on the system for seeing the true Ubuntu Linux performance on the same hardware.

 

Additionally, benchmarks were also done on this same system with Intel's latest Clear Linux distribution as the gold standard for x86_64 Linux performance to push the hardware to its full potential.

The same system was used for the duration of tests in the same configuration and was an Intel Core i7 8086K on an ASUS PRIME Z370-A motherboard, 120GB Intel 760p Optane SSD, and Radeon RX 580 graphics card.

 

With the basic SQLite embedded database benchmark, we see I/O performance is still a huge trouble for WSL with the October 2018 Update... But it did come in as slightly faster than the pre-October update. This SQLite benchmark took about one minute to complete with Ubuntu 18.04 on WSL or about two seconds when bare metal. The Clear Linux performance was too fast that an accurate measurement couldn't be obtained for this test.

 

The CompileBench compile test also indicates the October update performing slightly better, but still a substantial improvement is needed to make the WSL performance close to that of the I/O capabilities of Linux running on the hardware itself.

 

Tinymembench shows the RAM performance under WSL cam be about the same speed as Ubuntu 18.04 itself.

 

The Rodinia scientific tests also performed close to the same under WSL as Ubuntu itself while Clear Linux in the Lava molecular dynamics benchmark was much faster than Ubuntu 18.04.1.

With the NAMD simulator, the performance was the same across the board.

 

The bare metal Linux distributions were also faster with the MAFFT molecular biology benchmark while the April to October WSL performance was the same.

 

The x264 video encode performance under WSL remains on par with Linux itself.

 

WSL is much slower at compiling large code-bases due to the I/O bottleneck.

 

The Linux distributions had a small advantage with the Primesieve prime number benchmark.

 

The Node.js Octane benchmark on WSL wasn't too far behind Ubuntu 18.04 and Clear Linux.

 

Clear Linux and its optimizations allowed for faster Zstd compression performance.

 

The Blender rendering performance was effectively the same speed as Ubuntu itself while Clear Linux was a few seconds faster.

The Python performance in WSL was also acceptable.

 

The PHP performance did clock in as slower than Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS, which in turn was much slower than the optimized PHP found on Clear Linux.

 

The WSL performance with the BRL-CAD benchmark was the same as on Ubuntu itself and another small lead in favor of Clear Linux.

 

In the I/O tests under Windows Subsystem for Linux with the Windows 10 October 2018 Update there were some small improvements to note, but still significantly more work is needed by Microsoft to get the WSL I/O performance even remotely close to the Linux storage performance. Outside of the I/O workloads, the WSL performance was largely unchanged -- but generally speaking the WSL performance in these CPU/system benchmarks tend to be quite close to Ubuntu 18.04 itself.

 

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