NFS version 3 already has the READDIRPLUS operation which returns the directory contents and all of the stats together in one call to improve performance for th

NFS version 3 already has the READDIRPLUS operation which returns the directory contents and all of the stats together in one call to improve performance for this case. Sometimes the kernel client doesn't use READDIRPLUS and falls back to issuing a bunch of requests - usually because it's being super conservative about security (as if there is such a thing in NFS). It's also not that straightforward for a utility like ls to tell the kernel that it's reading both the directory and the stats for each file - they're separate system calls and the kernel has to figure out what the program is trying to do and optimise. I wrote a tool that issues raw READDIRPLUS requests to list a directory: https://rawgit.com/mprovost/NFStash/master/man/nfsls.8.html https://rawgit.com/mprovost/NFStash/master/man/nfsls.8.html