Windows with a better filesystem

• Turn off Last Access time
• Turn off Short File names
• Turn off Delete Notification
• Turn off Indexing
• Disable journeling
• Disable shadow copy and previous versons and quotas and shares.
• Enable bypass traverse checking

I guess that the real solution would be to rewrite your build system so that it used the native windows file system API, instead of the unix API (fopen etc) itself underneath the portability framework. But that's not going to happen, so basically you are stuck with whatever level of performance they thought was acceptable.

Often when using systems not originally written for Windows, you find that directory traversal has been handled very poorly, so make sure you have a very flat directory tree.

There is one file system which is supported by new Windows OS AND is faster than NTFS. It's exFAT. There's a possibility to use it for the system drive. But it's unknown what complications it might have.

You can certainly use it for other partitions though. It's faster with random read/write operations. Perfect for an SSD for example.

Do you have an anti virus program running that's doing on access/write checking for your project folder?

Compiling involves reading and writing lots of small files in quick succession, which can overwhelm the virus scanner. Add your project folder to the list of excluded folders and see if that improves the situation.

On Linux you (probably) don't have any anti virus software....