The Performance Cost To Ubuntu WSL2 On Windows 11 25H2
One of the areas that remains with the most significant overhead for running WSL2 is for workloads involving I/O performance. Such as for the common SQLite embedded database library that is widely-used by different applications there is a very substantial performance difference.
It's for the CPU workloads where WSL2 can be interesting with depending upon the particular case, can either perform quite similar to a bare metal Ubuntu Linux installation to having some overhead.
With WSL2 commonly being used by developers forced by their employer to run Microsoft Windows but needing to do Linux development, code compilation performance was a big focus for this round of testing. Indeed several seconds are added to the build time when running under WSL2 as opposed to bare metal Ubuntu.