@meso @Moon @mja If you have seen me yelling about pointer-chases, I was talking about linked lists 99% of the time. That's actually how inodes are chained together in most filesystems, and dirents taking up more than one block is why you see a huge cutoff: there's the block and then the pointer to the rest of the data, so that's another seek (which is nonzero cost even on an SSD) and another fetch. This is how rm ends up taking quadratic time.