Comment by ygra

> Anything that does lots of small writes, so basically anything unixy, suffers like this.

To be honest, when NTFS was conceived it probably didn't have as a design goal that common Unix patterns should be fast. After all, Unix applications use the file system for lots of things where Windows has different mechanisms for that purpose.

SVN sadly has to traverse the complete working copy and lock every single directory individually because every directory is also a working copy on its own. Most of the time SVN spends on, e.g., update, is spent on locking and unlocking. Git/hg only need to do this in one place and avoid that problem.