Windows with a better filesystem
While I'd love to see something like ZFS available for Windows hosts, NTFS isn't a horrible filesystem. It supports most "modern" filesystem features (extended attributes, journaling, ACLs, you name it), but it's hampered by Explorer and most other apps not supporting any of these.
One thing that will absolutely kill its performance is having "too many" entries in a directory. Once you pass a couple thousand entries in one directory, everything slows to a crawl. Literally the entire machine will halt waiting for NTFS to create or remove entries when this is happening.
I used to work with an app that generated HTML-based docs for .NET assemblies; it would create one file per property, method, class, namespace, etc. For larger assemblies we'd see 20+k files, all nicely dumped into a single directory. The machine would spend a couple of hours during the build blocked on NTFS.
In theory, Windows supports filesystem plugins, which would make native ZFS, ext3 or whatever (even FUSE) possible. In practice, the APIs are undocumented, so you're completely on your own.
Now, since you're doing Java development, could you install a different OS on your machine, or use a VM on top of Windows?
Also, you might want to try some platform-independent filesystem benchmarks (iozone, bonnie... there are probably more modern ones I don't know off the top of my head, maybe even a few written in Java) to see if it's actually the filesystem holding you back, or if it's something else. Premature optimization and all that...
- 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.