> This is why creating hard links on Windows is much slower Are you actually sure that's why? Usually the Windows bottleneck is in the I/O subsystem overhead r

> This is why creating hard links on Windows is much slower Are you actually sure that's why? Usually the Windows bottleneck is in the I/O subsystem overhead rather than the file system itself. Note that FindFirstFileName requires opening the file first, which is the operation that incurs a lot of overhead irrespective of what you're doing after. I read that on Linux this is avoided through the use of a cache (hash table?), which Windows doesn't have. Once the file is opened, the I/O performance on Windows and Linux is comparable.