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Comment by kgc | Hacker News Reader

WSL is very, very slow. Be warned.

It's really not slow, I use it for everyday work in webdev and I basically have very few complaints

With anything involving virtual hardware and such it is hit and miss across the board. Even if both your machines have 16GB doesn't mean your ram functions perfectly. I have a linux box that has a failing hard drive in it that causes the folder program to crash when it fails to read from it. If I didn't understand it was a failing hard drive issue I would either blame linux disto or the folder program.

There is no virtual anything with WSL. It’s Linux userspace running on Windows kernel.

WSL involves no virtualization.

WSL is slow at creating processes, and pretty quick at everything else (in my experience).

This can mean some git commands (for instance) run slowly due to all the processes launched in the associated bash scripts.

I posted this above, could be helpful: I believe Windows Defender is responsible for a lot of the IO overhead within WSL. You can get around that by marking your development directory as "don't scan" within Defender.

I use it every day. It really is perfectly fine!

I also use it every day and have very few issues ( one problem where it became corrupted and I had to reinstall ).

It's not a production machine no one is using it that way, its perfectly fine for development.

Yes, it felt quite slow in certain situations (the last time I’ve tried). Because the WSL works by emulating syscalls from Linux, anything related to I/O can be quite slow...

It's not quite the same as emulation, and the overhead is less. It natively supports these syscalls, and in some cases the syscalls trigger the same code as their windows counterparts

In others, like fork, entirely new and unique code is ran.

The only time that it’s painfully slow in my experience compared to native Linux is installing packages with apt.

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