Windows 10 WSL vs. Docker on Windows 10 vs. Bare Metal Linux Performance
With the single-threaded audio encoding tests, no huge differences between WSL vs. Docker vs. bare metal.
While FFmpeg video encoding was much faster when the Linux distributions were running bare metal compared to on Docker/WSL via Windows 10.
Blender 3D modeling performance on Ubuntu was close to the same across all three tested environments.
The PyBench Python performance was also similar when comparing the Windows 10 vs. WSL vs. bare metal performance.
SciKit-Learn also ran similarly across the tested platforms.
With the exception of I/O, Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux continues to run very well if you want Ubuntu or openSUSE access from your Windows 10 PC. There were a few exceptions depending upon the workload, but for the most part WSL was performing similar to these distributions running on Docker from Windows 10 and then the bare metal performance. If you are compiling a lot of software or other I/O heavy workloads, using Docker (or e.g. VirtualBox) makes more sense than WSL, but with Windows 10 Fall Creator's Update it's offering very capable performance if not able to install Linux bare metal on the system. Additional tests forthcoming.
If you enjoyed this article consider joining Phoronix Premium to view this site ad-free, multi-page articles on a single page, and other benefits. PayPal or Stripe tips are also graciously accepted. Thanks for your support.