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Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

I have two rigs here at home. A 12700k gaming box with a high end Nvme disk. Also, a 13900k workstation with Nvme disks as well. The gaming box runs Windows 11, and it feels generally snappy until I’m navigating the filesystem or dealing with compression. On the flip side the other box is running Debian 12 and feels significantly faster. Could be 12th gen vs 13th gen but I don’t think that’s the case.

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I have a Zen 2 Threadripper box that I dual boot (it's a workstation for coding that I sometimes play games on), and I can confirm. I don't know what the exact technical reason is or why nobody in Redmond is embarrassed. But anything relating to the filesystem is simply dog-slow on Windows, and the more high-end your system is, the more this becomes the major bottleneck.

The day I realized I could find files by file extension just like that in less than seconds from the terminal or nautilus changed my life.

It's because the NT filesystem is optimized for a different workload. This is why WSL2 (which you should be using) uses ext4 (that's the default with an Ubuntu distro, at least).

> the NT filesystem is optimized for a different workload

a different workload than browsing files in explorer?

TWUP (Transactional Windows Update Processing)

LOL had me fooled for a minute there.

oh wait maybe this isn't a joke? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_NTFS

I blame Windows Defender (anti-virus).

It's the first thing I disable whenever I want to do some serious disk I/O.

Also Windows still uses NTFS which dates back to 2000. For compatibility reasons, fair enough. But surely NTFS wasn't designed with SSDs in mind, let alone NVMEs.

NTFS has had several updates over the years, and supports trim just fine.

Of course, that doesn't make it comparable to ext4 or zfs or whatever, but I wouldn't expect it to be the worst bottleneck in the system.

Some updates, but it's still old. There is only so much you can do while still maintaining Microsoft's legendary backwards compatibility.

For example I'm running Windows 11 Pro on this machine with a brand new NVME.

"fsutil.exe fsinfo ntfsinfo c:" tells me [0] I'm running NTFS v3.1 which was released 22 years ago [1].

[0] https://i.imgur.com/VcXNO4P.png

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS

> There is only so much you can do while still maintaining Microsoft's legendary backwards compatibility.

...like adding support for more filesystems.

I'm curious about what (and when) other parts of the IO stack have been updated. Something has to have changed to add trim support: I'm guessing the scheduler.

Indeed. It's impressive how they managed to extend it.

Wikipedia provides some hints:

> Although subsequent versions of Windows added new file system-related features, they did not change NTFS itself. For example, Windows Vista implemented NTFS symbolic links, Transactional NTFS, partition shrinking, and self-healing.[21] NTFS symbolic links are a new feature in the file system; all the others are new operating system features that make use of NTFS features already in place.

If I had to guess, most of these new functionalities leverage NTFS metadata: https://ntfs.com/ntfs-system-files.htm

TRIM has nothing to do with performance. It’s for longevity of the disk.

> I blame Windows Defender (anti-virus).

It would be nice if Windows Defender tone down their on-the-fly aggressive scanning for anything I/O related. For any I/O activity, it regularly consumes up to 30% of my CPU. Moving files to a different directory rev up Windows Defender even it scans the folder in the past.

I wish there is a granular control over Windows Defenders in a way that it would not be aggressive with every I/O activity. I would assume that Microsoft intentionally did this due to rise of randomware attacks and we unfortunately have inept people who mindlessly clicking anything. And they don't want to be liable for being lax.

Exactly. If only I could tell Windows Defender to ignore every node_modules directory I have in my computer. Literally millions of files.

The solution is to not use windows.

You may want to give dev drive a try https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-drive/

IIRC there is a filesystem filter on windows where various apps like antivirus hook themselves, which was why filesystem access under WSL1 actually faster than windows.

Isn’t this hilarious? In order to achieve high performance on windows you need to access your file system via a virtual machine. Typically it’s the other way around.

My experience has always been that a Linux workstation environment outperforms Windows simply on account of the known poor performance of filesystem stuff on Windows vs Linux.

It's just different trade-offs. Windows has a user space env that does a shitload of background filesystem indexing/scanning. And then corporate environments usually cake on virus and compliance checkers on top of that. And then my understanding is that NTFS itself has always been optimized for different workloads than most Linux filesystems.

But right back into the 90s it was always like this.

When I boot this Ryzen laptop of mine into Windows, the core DE comes up really fast but there's then a good 2-3 minutes of busy cursors and background I/O hogging the machine before it becomes responsive. Ubuntu takes longer to boot, but then is immediately snappy as hell.

For mass market, consumer user stuff, the trade-offs make sense, I guess.

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