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At my last job I was responsible for 70 windows 11 machines. At my current job it’s 20. These are i7/i9 spec with 64+GB memory and NVMe drives. No endpoint mana
by maccard 4mo ago
At my last job I was responsible for 70 windows 11 machines. At my current job it’s 20. These are i7/i9 spec with 64+GB memory and NVMe drives. No endpoint management software, just Intune for device registration.
They all have _very significant _ performance issues out of the box, with very long app startups, and very confusing slowdowns. I am 99% sure it’s windows defender doing an absolute crap ton of work on every single file open, and ignoring file and folder exclusions.
- criddell 4mo agoI know IT people often aren't given the time to dig into this stuff, but xperf and event tracing should reveal the culprit fairly quickly. The best resource for this kind of stuff is Bruce Dawson's blog: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2015/09/24/etw-central/ https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2015/09/24/etw-central/
- maccard 4mo agoI'm not IT, I'm' just the senior most engineer in a game studio. Ive got WPA captures that point to windows defender, even with processes and folders excluded. But I have literally no idea what to do with those traces, hence my 99% conviction.
- fluoridation 4mo agoIf it's that bad, why not just disable it?
- 9x39 4mo agoEnterprise versions are tamper-protected.
- fluoridation 4mo agoCan you not dual boot into something else and delete the executable?
- 9x39 4mo agoDisk encryption is also mandated in most enterprises. I do not mean to patronize, it's just the enterprise-y stuff has tried locking down the PCs for exactly this reason - deleting the security tools when they're not loaded would be of course very effective. On top of that, showing such motivation can expose people to violating the 782 commandments of whatever corporate IT policy someone had to sign to get a paycheck. Rare is the security vs usability compromise in these companies that accounts for the need for high performance desktops, sadly.
- fluoridation 4mo agoEugh. Well, whatever. Not like it makes any difference to the employee. They get paid whether they're waiting for the computer to finish spinning or doing useful work.
- maccard 4mo agoWe’re spending $4-8000 on these machines to try and offset these problems. The problem is that there’s 100 of these “little” issues - and I have a full time job that _isnt_ doing IT support. If someone can help me find an IT support contractor that I can hire that will fix it I’d love to chat to them, but it goes in the pile alongside “why on earth does teams take longer to boot than my entire machine” and “why are we using zoom (because the person who makes the decision there prefers zoom to teams”)
- maccard 4mo agoI replied above but basically we still need something; some people are just incapable of not making a total mess and they will literally go to Trojan.com and install dangerous.msi, ignore all the optional dismissible pop ups that say this is bad, and then still drop me a DM that the cracked plugin they got for maya to try out before asking to spend $8 isn’t working… If there’s a middle ground I’d love to hear it!
- maccard 4mo agoI am the enterprise here. We enforce it on because the alternative is worse.
- maccard 4mo agoBecause the alternative is worse - no protection. Because we have everything in Intune we get the per device scan reports (I lied - we do enforce _some_ stuff as a group policy. We disable turning off certain features and we manage the windows update cadence) and thrrr have been multiple people who still need it… it’s generally non tech people who just download the absolute worst crap imaginable and ignore all the bypassable warnings too.
- saratogacx 4mo agoIf it is mostly your own tooling you may want to look at setting up a dev drive. It is supposed to be more optimized around workloads that would normally spin stuff like defender off the rails. System -> Advanced -> -> For developers -> Developer Mode [on] -> Dev Drive -> Create Dev Drive
- maccard 4mo agoI 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.
- saratogacx 4mo agoI'd much rather know that something I think should work won't and where it happens. Bad advice can't become good advice in a vacuum.
- maccard 4mo agoI ran a quick test this morning - it took 7 minutes to load the app after a reboot, 90 seconds to load the second time, and 50 seconds after a reboot with windows defender disabled. All on an NVMe drive with basically nothing else running (no browsers or anything). The WPA capture showed msmpeng. That’s with the folder, and UnrealEditor.exe excluded from defender.
- ngc248 4mo agoWindows defender has the uncanny ability of spiking up its resource usage at just the wrong time. Add in MS teams into the mix and the system just starts screaming.
- maccard 4mo agoI know nothing about how defender works internally but it seems to do a synchronous scan on every single file access and an extra long one on a DLL or exe. It seems to cache them but throws the entire cache away on restart. The behaviour is worse on C than another partition even if the partition is on the same drive. Anything that accessed a hunch of files on startup will bring your computer to its knees on first launch.