Hi Ricardo, Thanks for running this benchmark! Ricardo Wurmus skribis: > root@hydra-guix-127 ~# ls -1 /gnu/store/.links | wc -l > 2017395 That’s not a lot, my laptop has 2.8M links. It’s interesting to see that system time remains at ~4.2s in all modes. So the only thing that modes 2 and 3 achieve is increasing CPU time. It’s as if the order in which files are stat’d had no impact on I/O performance. Ludo’.