Azure DevOps Windows vs Ubuntu hosted agents for cross-platform apps

Question

Are there concrete reasons to select one agent OS over another for cross-platform apps? I see the choice frequently being made based on the developer's OS preference. I created a .net core console app this morning and a pipeline to build it against both windows and ubuntu hosted agents.

stages:
- stage: windows
  jobs:
  - template: build.yml
    parameters:
      pool: windows-latest 
- stage: ubuntu
  jobs:
  - template: build.yml
    parameters:
      pool: ubuntu-latest

I ran the pipeline several times. The windows build time vs ubuntu was considerably larger. I was able to use the analytics right out of the box in AzDO to get some insight:

I shared this internally and another dev tried switching their pipeline to Ubuntu. They saw roughly a 30% decrease in run time.

Questions following this experiment:

Are there types of tasks that run faster on Ubuntu vs Windows and vis versa due to the OS architecture?

Is it possible to "score" a pipeline in order to estimate the best OS to run it on?

Answer 1

I've tested some cross-platform scripts and found that they generally run less on Ubuntu agents than on Windows agents.

So, it's fair to say that if you don't care about the agent operating system, using Ubuntu is generally more time-efficient than using Windows.