WSL3 Boosts Memory Bandwidth by 61% Over WSL2
WSL3 Performance is about 5-60% faster than WSL2 depending on the workload
I benchmarked WSL 3.0.2.0 against WSL 2.6.3.0 on an Intel i5-8500T with Alpine Linux and Go 1.27.1. Memory bandwidth jumped 61%, scheduler latency fell 11%, and kernel time in a GoReleaser build dropped 16%. Wall-clock compilation improved only 4%, showing that compute-bound workloads still hit hardware limits, while IPC-heavy and memory-intensive tasks gain the most.
The single largest jump is sequential memory throughput, climbing from 7.84 GB/s to 12.64 GB/s.
- NGRhodes
Not sure what tonym thinks is being tested.
Craig Loewen (MS product manager for WSL) on X stated :
>As a PSA, there is no such thing as WSL 3! I've seen some articles talking about it, and it's not currently a thing.
>
>However we did just announce WSL container (Or WSLc for short which might be where the confusion is coming from) and that will be available in just a week or so!
- ReDress
syscall/basic getppid() throughput 1,474,691 ops/s 1,533,399 ops/s +3.98%
Entry/exit latency 0.6781 µs/op 0.6521 µs/op -3.83%
sched/pipe 100k process ping-pong 48,445 ops/s 54,589 ops/s +12.68%
Context switch latency 20.64 µs/op 18.32 µs/op -11.25%
sched/messaging Hackbench (20 groups, 800 tasks) 14.507 s 13.047 s -10.06%
mem/memcpy glibc default bandwidth (1GB) 7.84 GB/s 12.64 GB/s +61.35%
This is great, this is some good work. But, like an issue I described before with Linux kernel io-uring[1], this fails to test and demonstrate performance with a healthy server load.
This obviously fails to depict a healthy server load because it's just way too specific.
- jesse_dot_id
I jumped ship from Windows a couple of years ago after having used it since the early 90's. One of the primary reasons was how much I had to fight with WSL2 in my day-to-day work. But now it's becoming even more apparent that Microsoft does not care about its operating system. I don't even know what they could do to get me back. Trust continues to be a huge problem in the AI era of Microsoft.
- 1718627440
WSL2 is a different product from WSL1, not a different version. Is WSL3 now a different version of WSL2 or another separate product?
- armcat
Great job in benchmarking! I wasn't even aware of the WSLc (WSL3) release. For others, the release info is available here: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/releases/tag/3.0.1
EDIT: stumbled on the previous HN post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49970507