The Performance Cost To Ubuntu WSL2 On Windows 11 25H2
Written by Michael Larabel in Operating Systems on 15 September 2025 at 10:50 AM EDT. Page 4 of 6. 44 Comments.
Those considering WSL2 for Node.js development, there was a small performance hit observed but nothing that would be noticeable unless you were considering Node.js under WSL2 in a production server...
Perl scripts were faster on bare metal Ubuntu but nothing that would be very noticeable to most developers.
Another surprising upset with this WSL2 testing was to find the Python scripting performance under Ubuntu WSL2 was actually faster than bare metal Ubuntu. Across all the different Python benchmarks, WSL2 was tied or faster. Presumably this comes down to CPU frequency scaling / power management differences between Windows and Linux.
PHP was also faster on WSL2 than bare metal Ubuntu 24.04 LTS for this AMD Ryzen 9 desktop.