3 ms·

When I moved over from WSL to WSL2, WSL2 was extremely slow. I quickly realized my mistake. On WSL2 IO on the Windows filesystem is actually extremely slow. I m

• chrismorgan 6y ago
  In WSL 1, Linux accessing Windows files is slow, and Linux accessing Linux files is extremely slow. In WSL 2, Linux accessing Windows files is very slow, and Linux accessing Linux files is fast. A couple of years back Fastmail’s webmail build process did a lot of theoretically unnecessary process spawning and file rereading (spawning Node.js several thousand times). I don’t have the exact figures on hand, but in WSL 1 with the files on C:, a full build would take about half an hour (files in WSL was not even worth considering, it took many hours). Under WSL 2 on C:, that full build would take an hour and a half. Under WSL with files under Linux, it was down to just a few minutes (partly because of faster I/O, partly because of faster process spawning). As I say, I don’t have the exact figures on hand, but that’s my recollection of the ballparks. Like you, I steadily shifted just about all my stuff to the Linux side and reaped the benefits. After a while I even uninstalled Windows gVim altogether as I was always using Linux Vim in the terminal. (I start things in VcXsrv occasionally, but not often.)