Just sharing a find with the community.
For a while now our (huge) FMOD project has suffered from extremely long opening times (15 minutes or more), but it wasn’t always consistent. We chalked it up to Perforce communication as normally that’s usually the cause for us when things bog down, but recently a summer intern just happened to have task manager open and noticed windows defender was going crazy while opening the project. Whitelisting the project (and our entire perforce workspace while we were at it) in the security settings brought us back in business and now it only takes a minute or so to load up.
Hope that can help someone else!