Webroot impact on performance Windows 2019 vs 2012 R2

We have used webroot for many years, without any major hickups. We have a farm of servers running web applications based on Microsoft.net, so nothing particularly fancy but some features in the system are a bit I/O intensive. They are hosted on GCP and AWS, so vms basically.

Now when we have (finally) done “in place” upgrades from 2012 R2 to 2019, we notice that everything went to a halt, basically losing about half the performance on average. First I thought, 2019 is a bloat, maybe we need to do clean installs instead of in place upgrades. But no, this doesn’t help. Then I saw that Defender was active next to webroot. This was a bit alarming, and after disabling Defender, we notice an improvement. But still, if we also disable Webroot we gain another 30% in performance and it’s only then it is comparable to 2012 R2 performance.

I’ve tried adding exclusions and it does help a bit (but only if I untick “detect if malicious”) but is that really the only way to go?

Anyone has had similar issues and found a solution?

thanks

Johan