I am working with WSL a lot lately because I need some native UNIX tools (and emulators aren't good enough). I noticed that the speed difference when working with NPM/Yarn is incredible.
I conducted a simple test that confirmed my feelings. The test was running npx create-react-app my-test-app and the WSL result was Done in 287.56s. while GitBash finished with Done in 10.46s..
This is not the whole picture, because the perceived time was higher in both cases, but even based on that - there is a big issue somewhere. I just don't know where. The project I'm working on uses tens of libraries and changing even one of them takes minutes instead of seconds.
Is this something that I can fix? If so - where to look for clues?
Additional info:
my processor: Processor AMD Ryzen 7 5800H with Radeon Graphics, 3201 Mhz, 8 Core(s), 16 Logical Processors
I'm running Windows 11 with all the latest updates to both the system and the WSL. The chosen system is Ubuntu 20.04
I've seen some questions that are somewhat similar like 'npm install' extremely slow on Windows, but they don't touch WSL at all (and my pure Windows NPM works fast).
the issue is not limited to NPM, it's also for Yarn
another problem that I'm getting is that file watching is not happening (I need to restart the server with every change). In some applications I don't get any errors, sometimes I get the following:
Watchpack Error (initial scan): Error: EACCES: permission denied, lstat '/mnt/c/DumpStack.log.tmp'Watchpack Error (initial scan): Error: EACCES: permission denied, lstat '/mnt/c/hiberfil.sys'Watchpack Error (initial scan): Error: EACCES: permission denied, lstat '/mnt/c/pagefile.sys'Watchpack Error (initial scan): Error: EACCES: permission denied, lstat '/mnt/c/swapfile.sys'npm startin an empty (freshly initialized)create-react-apptakes ages to render something in the browser in WSL and when executed from GitBash - I can see stuff in 2-4 secondsit is possible that's it's purely a WSL problem, but it just hurts the most when using NPM/Yarn