In reply to that: 1) I find that for the large repos I work on the difference goes from "noticeably slow" to "I don't notice it" which is somewhere on the magi

In reply to that: 1) I find that for the large repos I work on the difference goes from "noticeably slow" to "I don't notice it" which is somewhere on the magical ~200ms boundary. 2) This really doesn't help, the Git repo is likely in the FS cache anyway, you'll get exactly the same results / speedup if you do this in /dev/shm i.e. the in-memory filesystem. This has nothing to do with fast drives, it has to do with syscall overhead. Recursively stat-ing a huge directory is simply never going to be all that fast. 3) Irrelevant for the reasons noted above.