Speeding up Windows builds

[celstark]

On my laptop here, my application was taking 13-15 minutes to run package:windows. Sure, I've got a ton of stimulus files, but that's just pretty crazy. This is related to Windows Defender. I saw a neat totally unrelated talk on rust-docs install times being tied to this. Sure enough, temporarily disabling it takes it down to 5.5 min on the laptop.

You can profile Windows Defender's performance and see what's up. The biggest culprit was AppData\Local\Temp\electron-packager. Whitelisting that folder (Windows Security, Exclusions, Add or remove exclusions) got me down to 7.5 minutes alone. Here's the list I came up with in the end:

C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\SquirrelTemp
C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Temp\electron-packager
PROJDIR\build
PROJDIR\node_modules
PROJDIR\out

You may not want to whitelist PROJDIR\node_modules as these are coming from the outside world. Everything else though seems solid to whitelist. In the end, I got the build time down to 5.8 m with the whitelists.