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Comment by anhner | Hacker News Reader

How do you deal with performance issues with files not on the linux machine?

I had this problem at first (I kept my source codes in a separate drive to be able to edit them from my Windows IDE), but nowadays I just keep all my code files in WSL and I don't notice the problem at all anymore. VSCode makes interacting with the box completely transparent.

For me, this hasn't been an issue. I think number one is just that I don't have to do this often. Perhaps sometimes I download a file with my Windows browser and save it locally, and then want to get to it in WSL2. Maybe I'll copy it somewhere locally, or since it's just a one-off, grab it. And performance doesn't seem like a problem. All drives are NVMe SSD. Perhaps if you have use cases where you're managing/editing a lot of files between file systems, it could add up to some frustration.

There is no performance issues with WSL2. It was only the case with the first version of WSL.

WSL2 has better performance for accessing files in the WSL filesystem than WSL1 does (partly because the WSL files are stored differently).

But it has worse performance for accessing native Windows files than WSL1 does.

In any case I think an assertion that WSL2 has no performance issues needs a serious citation (as opposed to no citation which you gave) - you're making a claim about all possible situations. As always, a statement that "no x exists" requires seriously more proof than "at least one x does exist".

That's not the full story. WSL2 has serious regressions in cross-OS performance, and many users have switched back to WSL1, which supposedly isn't going away any time soon.

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