Comment by setquk
7 years ago
I can’t see MFT contention mentioned once. That’s what absolutely and totally destroys small file write performance. This affects source operations, WSL, compilers, file storage, everything.
And that’s so architecturally tied to the guts of NT you can’t fix it without pushing a new NTFS revision out. Which is risky and expensive.
Which is incidentally why no one at Microsoft even seems to mention it I suspect and just chips at trivial issues around the edges.
Bad show. NTFS is fundamentally broken. Go fix it.
Edit: my experience comes from nearly two decades of trying to squeeze the last bit of juice out of windows unsuccessfully. My conclusion is don’t bother. Ext4, ZFS and APFS are at least an order of magnitude more productive and this is a measurable gain.
Perhaps we didn't read the same article. What it says that the root of problem is the Windows IO subsystem architecture. Change NTFS for anything and you will get the same problem.
But that’s not the case. The root cause is the MFT and NTFS architecture. People fail to mention that because the problem is harder to fix. It’s almost that there is a “do not speak bad of NTFS” going on.
You can demonstrate this by using a third party file system driver for NT. when NTFS on its own is eliminated the performance is much much better. This is a neat little differential analysis which is conclusive. I can’t remember the product I used when I evaluated this about 8 years ago unfortunately.