I'm putting together a Windows box that will act as a continuous integration build server; we'll mostly build C# stuff using MSBuild, but I think this question applies to any compiled language on Windows.
What filesystem configuration settings should I use? (e.g. disabling NTFS last access time) The build server will spend a lot of time reading and writing small files, and scanning directories to see which files have been modified.
NOTE: Data integrity is a low priority in this case; it's just a build machine ... the final artifacts will be zipped up and archived elsewhere. If the filesystem on the build machine gets corrupted and loses all data, we can just wipe and re-image; builds will continue running as before. So we're prepared to play fast and loose with data integrity to get better performance.
the settings you might want to tune are:
NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation (1), NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate(1),NtfsMftZoneReservation(4)
Zone reservation should be set juat after or prior to formatting the disk
All of these keys are under HKLM/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Control/FileSystem
That being said, as long as it's running 2008 r2 you should be all set with the defaults as many of these "extra" operations will be cached anyway.
I would take a look at Performance Tuning Guidelines for Windows Server 2008 R2 to get better file server performance.