Probably having to check if the actual disk entries changed is what slows it down. I wonder if it would be possible with nowadays' memory sizes to keep all meta

Probably having to check if the actual disk entries changed is what slows it down. I wonder if it would be possible with nowadays' memory sizes to keep all metadata in memory as a write-through cache. Not sure if it'd be worth it though, my system has close to half a million files, but I'm only interested in about a hundred or so. I don't think file systems are slow in practice for typical human-scale operations though, with the exception of non-indexed "search all my files" type of operations.