For engineers running lean environments on WSL 2, every megabyte of RAM and every CPU cycle counts. Many developers are unaware of the significant “performance tax” imposed by kernel-level mitigations for vulnerabilities like Spectre and Meltdown.

In a recent set of benchmarks on a Go-based backend project, disabling these mitigations resulted in a 31.7% reduction in wall-clock compilation time. Here is how you can audit your system and decide if the trade-off is right for your workflow.