What is better environments for nodejs?
Recently I needed to setup nodejs, because recently I bought the new desktop. In my old system, I suffered from slow npm install. Because I don’t want to use preview version of windows, I can’t use WSL2. So I have two options for nodejs environment. Nodejs on WSL or Native Windows. For right decision, I measured the time for some of items related with nodejs.
Test Environment
- CPU: Ryzen 3700x (8C 16T)
- RAM: 64GB 2600Mhz (Samsung 16GB x 4)
- SSD: Samsung 970 EVO
- WSL: Arch Linux WSL version 1
- nodejs: v12.11.1
Test Result
| Category | Native Windows | WSL | Comparison |
|---|---|---|---|
| Create React App | 94s | 147s | WSL takes 56% more. |
| npm run build | 6s | 6s | same |
| Octane (3x avg) | 41641 | 41438 | same (0.4% diff) |
Conclusion
- When it comes to computation, WSL and Native Windows are almost same.
- Because WSL’s IO is not good, CRA(Create React App) takes 56% more in WSL.
- But in WSL2, IO performance will be better. I am looking forward to 20H1 update.
- Because of Linux’s convinient CLI environments, I will choose WSL despite of the preformance drop.