> is disk IO bottlenecked by NVMe/PCIe limits, or by disk iops limits? Note that I'm out of my depth here, so this is all speculation. Until we hit hardware li

> is disk IO bottlenecked by NVMe/PCIe limits, or by disk iops limits? Note that I'm out of my depth here, so this is all speculation. Until we hit hardware limitations (which will be PCIe 6 if I had to guess), I'm pretty sure those are the same thing. One read/write iop = 4KiB. If your PCIe bandwidth is limited to N GB/s, then there are only so many iops you can physically send/receive to/from the SSD, regardless of how many iops the SSD could be capable of processing. So currently we're bottlenecked by PCIe, but I doubt that will continue to be the case. > again, you're handwaving on what "interfere" means It depends on how the file system is implemented, but my guess would be that a lock on the inode or block cache entry is acquired. > do "inode mappings" represent resources with no shared resource constraints? Those are the contents of the directory. The problem is not reading them, but changing them.