Found an interesting way to speed things up a little on larger catalogs. Kind of dumb accident as I was moving the database to a brand new install that did not have antivirus installed on it yet. Of course my first thought when I had it running on this system was that it was a virgin Win10 install, so it had to be about as quick as it ever will be on that system. And there is some truth to that.... But as soon as I installed my antivirus I noticed a big hit on the database speed, not as bad as on the real messy computer it came from, but still a very noticeable hit on speed.
So I started playing with the real time protection settings, because clearly there had to be a correlation there. I typically have my antivirus already set to not check on every open or execution of a file... that just gets laborious at times and as long as it checks while creating or modifying, I feel pretty good about my protection and I have had no issues with this setup. I also run 3 times a week nightly full runs on the systems, so that is my "backup".
Anyway, since a db creates lots of temp files and makes modifications to existing files, just turning of the open and creation was not gaining really anything. I then found a setting in my antivirus that allows me to completely disregard a folder for real time protection, so that is what I did. I set it up to completely disregard real time protection for the SQL server folder where the data is stored. Voila, speed was back up to before installing the antivirus.
What I was doing is in the advanced setup and I am sure it is not available on free AV versions (including Microsoft's Defender), but if you do have a paid AV, you may want to give this a go if you feel comfortable with technically lowering your security a bit. Virtually all paid AVs offer free 30 day trials, so it might be worth a shot. You do need to make sure it has the function to allow disregarding an entire folder. (I use ESET). The path you should be able to find on your system to do this is:
C:/Program Files/Microsoft SQL Server/MSSQL12.SIXBITDBSERVER
Where MSSQL12.SIXBITDBSERVER is the folder and all its subfolders that you exclude from real time scan.
*** Again, this is messing with your security and you should understand the ramifications of this and make sure you have all your other defenses and client computers (if you have any) properly configured. Otherwise you can get yourself in trouble with opening up your system to attacks. ***
Richard