I recently started using Windows as my main development environment (because that's what most Firefox users use and I want to improve the Firefox development experience on Windows so more people develop on Windows). It seems every day I find another source of painful slowdowns and productivity issues on Windows. Today's is Windows Defender (which is installed by default on Windows 10).
As I measured in bug 1272851, Windows Defender slows down execution of the xpcshell harness by ~2x. Other operations like building are also impacted. Basically anything do lots of file creation and writes will be significantly slower, especially on SSDs. Until we find a way to alert people to the negative performance impact of Windows Defender (or most other anti-virus solutions for that matter) in bug 1276019, I would invite you to consider having Windows Defender (or other anti-virus products) exclude the Firefox source and object directories so file scanning doesn't slow down I/O intensive development operations. Of course, I can't blindly recommend you disable security. But you should at least weigh the risks against the known productivity gains. Instructions for adding an exclusion to Windows Defender are available at https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/instantanswers/64495205-6ddb-4da1-8534-1aeaf64c0af8/add-an-exclusion-to-windows-defender . _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
