Slow load times when using HyperV / WSL2 feature

I figured I would make a thread about this phenomenon I've observed, because I couldn't find anything else on the internet about it.

The TLDR is:
I was using the WSL2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux) feature on Windows 10 (20H2) and I observed very slow load times.
I turned off the WSL and HyperV ("Virtual Machine Platform") features in Windows, and now my load times are significantly better.


Up until just recently, I was observing very long load times. Always longer than 5 seconds, and often as much as 10 or 20 seconds to zone into a hideout or map.

I was pretty confident it wasn't my hardware: AMD 3950x, 2080ti, Samsung 970 Pro NVME SSD.
For a long time I just put it down to the game's performance, or Windows.



I don't have precise benchmarks to back this up, but when I disabled 'Windows Subsystem for Linux', 'HyperV' and 'Virtual Machine Platform' in "Optional Features" in windows, my load times *significantly* improved.

Now I haven't seen a load time longer than 2 seconds all day. I figured I'd write this post since I hadn't seen any mention about this online, but maybe it impacts other people too.

With Windows 10 going forward, I believe that if you want to use WSL, it will need to use "WSL2" which actually uses HyperV to virtualize a Linux system transparently.
However, from my understanding, enabling HyperV on a Windows box actually causes *everything* to run 'in' HyperV, including the base OS. So I think this might be related to worse I/O performance, or some other kind of performance impact.

So, if you have bad load times, and you use HyperV/WSL2 on windows, try disabling it and see if that fixes it.

I'm affected by this.

Disabling it between game launches is untenable.

I can only surmise that Path of exile addresses storage in a non-standard way.

Can we get some kind of review by development on this?

The steps to reproduce are simple..

If this is true, then GGG MUST fix this. It's unfeasable to expect me to disable & turn-off everything I am doing with the WSL2. Enabling it should have a marginal effect on performance, if any at all.

For myself, also using Win10 20H2 (i5, 12Gb RAM, 500Gb SSD), I am using HyperV, but only for a couple of VMs, not WSL2.

Performance is the same or only slightly impacted after installing HyperV.

Just wanted to add that as an extra data point :-)

Using HyperV, although my gaming PC is not my hypervisor, only my administration box, W10-2004, I78700K, 40GB ram, Samsung Evo 960 Pro m.2, gtx 1080ti.

I have not had a serious problem, or any worse performance than my wife running similar or better specs without HyperV.

Why would you run VMs from your gaming PC though and not expect diminished performance on your VM(s) and/or host? If you want great performance, you should dedicate to a specific task, otherwise you will end up in a "jack of many trades, master of none" scenario.

Depending on what your VMs do, making a great hypervisor is really cheap. Get a top of the line processor thats a few years old, throw 16-32 gb of memory (or more if you need it), grab any old harddrive (or an SSD if you need speedy performance or build a NAS and not worry about it) and there you go. Dedicated hypervisor for <500 bucks.

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Aevaris wrote:

Why would you run VMs from your gaming PC though and not expect diminished performance on your VM(s) and/or host? If you want great performance, you should dedicate to a specific task, otherwise you will end up in a "jack of many trades, master of none" scenario.

Totally, I agree. I mainly use WSL(2) to SSH into a proper server. The issue is that WSL2 requires all the HyperV stuff turned on to work.


At some point I want to get some actual numbers on load-times with/without HyperV. There could very well be some other factor that impacts the performance.

Main reason I made this post was just to raise awareness that this performance interaction might exist, and turning HyperV off seems to fix it for me.

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MorgueFLB wrote:

For myself, also using Win10 20H2 (i5, 12Gb RAM, 500Gb SSD), I am using HyperV, but only for a couple of VMs, not WSL2.

Performance is the same or only slightly impacted after installing HyperV.

Just wanted to add that as an extra data point :-)

You do understand that using ANY hypervisor (Hyper-V, VMWare and so on) with PoE is against ToS and will get you perma banned......

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JC_GGG wrote:

Hey there, nemykal. I'm glad to hear that this worked for you! I hope this information is able to help anyone else experiencing the same problems.

Fix this. If I have to choose between a feature I need for dev/work and your game, your game loses.

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JC_GGG wrote:

Hey there, nemykal. I'm glad to hear that this worked for you! I hope this information is able to help anyone else experiencing the same problems.

sorry for hijacking the thread but a lot of people including myself are having SIGNIFICANT performance issues that appear to be related to the texture streaming technology and has nothing to do with the solution posted here. There's several other post with dozens of pages and not even the slightest acknowledgment from GGG.

At this stage I don't really care if it's an issue that's gonna take long to resolve but even knowing that GGG is aware of it and working on a solution would be enough. Otherwise the idea of being like this the full league just makes me want to stop playing for the first time in years.