Windows Defender makes Node extremely slow

[Adam Ahmed]

Node was doing fine for me until maybe 2-3 weeks ago. I'm not sure what changed, but now every time I run a grunt or gulp task, it becomes _extremely_ slow. Even just getting an error like "Fatal error: unable to find local grunt" goes from taking 629ms to taking 34 seconds.

https://monosnap.com/image/mMk1JwoF67IITaYBdNCLJMDsPSMA0Y.png (also attached)

I've found that turning off the "real-time protection" from Windows Defender makes Node fast again. Which is fine, but I kind of like being protected. I've tried configuring Windows Defender to create an exception for the node.exe process, for the files in my repository, for any *.js files, and for the AppData/Roaming/npm and npm-cache directories. but no luck.

Has anyone else seen this? It's really annoying.