Both Ubuntu 21.10 and Windows 11 will arrive next month. The release date of the former is October 14th, and the release date of the latter is October 5th. The two are about 1 week apart. Recently, Phoronix compared these two upcoming operating systems, and the results showed that the two are evenly matched.
This time, Phoronix tested three systems, namely Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL 2) in Windows 11 system, Ubuntu 21.10 and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. The hardware used in the test equipment is the same as the one used last time, including:
- AMD Ryzen 9 5900X
- GeForce RTX 3090
- 16GB memory (8GB for WSL).
- WD Black SN850 1TB (2 275GB virtual disks of WSL)
- Windows 11 Build 22454
The benchmark suite includes various workstations and HPC workloads. It has been observed that WSL 2 on Windows 11 performs quite well in most cases when compared to Ubuntu under moderate CPU-intensive conditions. However, when the memory and I/O system come into play or the CPU workload is heavy, it will lag far behind, as can be seen from the picture below.
But for WSL 2 on Windows 11, everything is not a bad thing, because it can even beat Ubuntu 21.10 and 20.04 LTS by a large margin in the Nginx web server benchmark test. In total, in a total of 130 tests, Windows 11 WSL 2 is about 6-7% slower than Ubuntu 21.10 and slightly lower than Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
But please keep in mind that the version of Windows 11 tested here belongs to the Dev channel, and its performance may be different from the public version of Windows that will be released next month. You can find a complete performance evaluation and more tests on the Phoronix website.
