Hacker News Reader

Comment by rurban | Hacker News Reader

I need to constantly recompile my work app, and it needs a few hours. the last 2 months I did nothing else than trying to compile this app in various configurations and dependency versions to find a state which works. there was none. commercial Windows shit of course, no ccache, and most of the time McAfee antivirus interferes.

just 3 hours would be very nice. clasp also needs about a day.

View on HN

Solution: dont run antivirus on workstation, or at the very least exclude your dev folders from scanning. Alot of your ”compile time” is antivirus eating cpu on compile artifacts.

I think the charitable way to read their comment is that they're aware the AV is a problem but can't do anything about it because it is a work machine and thus likely administrated by a whole other team.

Even in that case it's worth talking to the security team about it.

They may have done. I've worked at plenty of places where the corporate machine was so locked down and corporate IT was so far removed from development that I ended up using two machines: a corporate one with AD credentials and a BOYD MacBook Pro. Some places eventually allowed me to run inTune on the MBP to access some corporate services but others haven't. And I know of places that have flat out refused engineers to BOYD.

the av ticket is only a few months old yet. in this env a typical IT ticket needs 6 months. esp. when you are not allowed to talk to anyone. a windows shop.

That's not the responsibility of any open source project to solve though. If the AV slows down productivity then it's up to office politics to decide whether the perceived security/compliance is more important than developer time or whether they should talk to their AV vendor to optimize scanning or whatever.

And I think this is mostly a windows problem with the synchronous filter drivers? On linux you can hook filesystem accesses asynchronously.

> That's not the responsibility of any open source project to solve though.

Nobody said it was.

> If the AV slows down productivity then it's up to office politics to decide whether the perceived security/compliance is more important than developer time or whether they should talk to their AV vendor to optimize scanning or whatever.

I agree and everyone here is assuming the GP hasn't already tried that. Sometimes, and particularly in enterprise orgs, making minor quality of life improvements for developers is an impossible task. Sometimes you don't realize just how these places can operate until you've worked in one.

> And I think this is mostly a windows problem with the synchronous filter drivers? On linux you can hook filesystem accesses asynchronously.

Yeah it's very specifically a Windows issue. Windows IO is a lot more event driven from what I understand which makes Linux faster at randomly accessing files but virus scanners more effective (not that I have a particularly high opinion for them to begin with) on Windows.

Unfortunately, Windows is what 99% of enterprise orgs IT teams provision for their staff.

Even those that happen to use macOS and GNU/Linux might face the fun of having a AV running, because of IT policies.

Those enterprise AV have macOS, GNU/Linux and even iOS/Android versions for a reason.

Yep, AV vendors and various certifications and the security consultancy industry have created a "something must be done, this is somethign, thereferore it must be done" situation profiting from security problems that feeds on orgs that have fallen into the pattern of uncritically doing what everyone else is doing in the industry.

Maybe reboot into Linux and use cross-compilation with ccache/distcc/etc to speed it up :)

I'd suggest something like building from Gitlab CI jobs with Runners running on dedicated VM or spinning temporary Windows containers. Of course that might be shallow as I don't know the complexities of your project.

add another ssd, or create new partition, and disable all antivirus on it, and put your code there.

ha, nice idea. of course forbidden. this is high security code.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com