I need to write the blog post. I keep being told this, and it’s not the solution.

After a reboot, on an NVMe dev drive with no disk encryption, first launch of our internal application (unreal editor) takes 9 minutes on my workstation. If I disable windows defender before launching it, it takes 30 seconds. If I add all the processes as exclusions, and add the workspace folder as an exclusion to defender… 9 minutes.

edit:

I didn't mean to direct this at you. I mean that it's somehow gained traction as being the solution to slow filesystem access, but the reality is it's just broken.