NTFS is a more sophisticated files filesystem but it has a worse performance under certain workloads, specifically the workload underneath `yarn install`

That'll be due to the file system filter driver[s] (i.e. antivirus). This should impact most/all file systems where the file system filter driver supports said file system.

Disable/remove the file system filter drivers and the performance issues largely disappear.

On current pro versions, you can’t really disable the live protection constantly, but you can add a permanent exclusion for your home folder or the whole drive. This should greatly speed up operations like that. Still a lot faster to do them inside a Docker container/volume on the same Windows host.

Also Docker and installing applications that have lots of small files.

In general NTFS doesn’t do well with lots of small files because opening files is expensive compared to ext4 (dramatic oversimplification). This shows up in random places where very little actual file reading/writing is happening for each file, like yarn, docker, installing video games, etc.

NTFS also has a 260 character path limit [0], which as the sibling comment says can really jam up node_modules and the current HEAD of the intellij-community repo which currently has some giant filename in a subdirectory of its repo

I'm aware of their claim about using Group Policy to remove the limit but I've never used GP in order to know its sharp edges for my gaming computer

0: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/naming...

NTFS has never had a limit of other than 32K. MAX_PATH limited 260 characters for the Win32 API (among others). It has always been possible to bypass the 260 character limit, though obviously most applications wouldn't work with a file that exceeded the system-defined MAX_PATH value.

Office does its own thing and doesn't leverage MAX_PATH. No idea why.