I was installing some web stuff using npm, and noticed that it takes a lot of time on my home computer compared to my work computer. It turned out that the main culprit is Windows Defender: the same package took 4 minutes to install with Windows Defender off, and 15 minutes with Windows Defender on. This is a big difference: those minutes do add app and eat your productivity. I replaced Windows Defender with eSet Nod32 Antivirus and now the install time is back down to 4 minutes.

I’ve been using eSet NOD32 for about 10 years now. From experience I found that major antiviruses like McAfee and Norton tend to slow down the PC a lot, while eSet is lightweight and fast, and catches viruses just as well. The good old eSet still got it, while Windows Defender joins the ranks of inefficient slow antiviruses. To be fair, unlike its famous cousins, Windows Defender is free, so you get what you are paying for.

The package in question was yeoman’s ng2-webpack generator for Angular 2 apps. After installing npm and yeoman, run the command is yo ng2-webpack.

My hard drive is SSD, so I would expect fast performance, but alas. This generator downloads tons of small modules from the Internet and produces a rather large package with over nine thousand 24,000 files and about 9,000 directories. It is no wonder that a slow antivirus solution triples the installation time.

PS. Surprisingly, disk indexer does not have much influence on the outcome: the time with and without indexer is about the same.