[acqq]

NTFS on Windows was indeed always significantly slower when doing a lot of file operations. It was noticeable even long before WSL existed: NTFS and the whole infrastructure connected to it has by design bigger maintenance cost for every opening of the file, for example. That's undeniable. One can say that NTFS could have maybe been implemented faster on some other system (with less hooks etc), but NTFS on Windows is provably slower for the file operations people do every day on Linux, that's a simple fact. Like working with big source repositories containing a lot of files (git, node.js). The people who decided to make WSL2 faster for Linux programs achieved the speedup by going full VM. I would also prefer that they worked on NTFS on Windows long enough until the file operations become faster for everybody, but it didn't happen.

That's one of the lost opportunities that the original article laments about.

Edit: a reply to dataflow’s "try your operations on another file system" answer: I don't have to, I remember: there was a time when people used FAT formatted media much more than today -- and NTFS was slower than FAT too, under the same Windows, on the same hardware, without installing anything from third parties. It can be that on Windows 10 FAT got to be comparably slow, but in earlier times, on slower machines, FAT was visibly faster compared to NTFS. But NTFS was more robust to failures, and I preferred using NTFS for anything that is not temporary. I admit that the whole Windows infrastructure around what we consider purely "a filesystem" is also a serious part of the problem, by design. And as I wrote, it's a lost opportunity that the bottlenecks weren't identified and the changes made to the benefit of everything on some future Windows.

[mehrdadn]

Again: try your operations on another file system, then tell me it's NTFS that's slow.

It's not NTFS that's slow at opening files. It's the I/O subsystem. You'll see the slowness with other file systems too.

[for_xyz]

This is the correct answer. Myth that NTFS is slow should already go away.

You can already run windows on top of BTRFS if you want but it'll be painfully slow compared to linux [1].

https://twitter.com/NTDEV_/status/1327358814891470850 https://github.com/maharmstone/quibble

[acqq]

Note: I've explicitly said: "NTFS on Windows" and "NTFS and the whole infrastructure connected to it". Also: "NTFS was slower than FAT" was true for years. I have no experience with BTRFS, but that doesn't prove anything without knowing more details (the overhead introduced to make it work). So... it's both NTFS and the Windows "subsystems."

[for_xyz]

> So... it's both NTFS and the Windows "subsystems."

Ok, probably both on default windows installation due legacy and backward compatibility with dos names [1].

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrati...

I remember this issue when creating few million of files inside one folder and it was extremelly slow because of 8dot3 name creation. It has to go through each filename to generate short name O(n) when this legacy feature is enabled.

After disabling 8dot3 there were no performance issues anymore.

> I have no experience with BTRFS, but that doesn't prove anything without knowing more details (the overhead introduced to make it work)

I tried to point out following: Ext4, Btrfs, Zfs, any other UNIX filesystem will be slow under Windows. NTFS or any Windows first filesystem will be slow on Linux. There is just too much of the differences in OS architecture between the NT and Linux.