At just 60 MB/s it doesn't matter much (even 512 byte blocks would just be a little more than 100k syscalls / second). At a couple hundred MB/s it begins to mat

At just 60 MB/s it doesn't matter much (even 512 byte blocks would just be a little more than 100k syscalls / second). At a couple hundred MB/s it begins to matter, and with faster NVMe SSDs it's a legit issue. This becomes a bigger issue if it's not a kernel-based, local FS, but something that does more work, I mentioned FUSE above. Since no read merging happens, small reads like 4k or 32k start to hurt earlier, especially if the FS is written in an interpreter. Some of these also mishandled small reads, incurring an additional penalty (I know because I fixed that in an implementation).