&quot;This is actually very different than traditional network file systems like SMB, NFS, WebDAV, and SSHFS. With a normal network file system over the WAN you would have major latency problems trying to `cd` and `ls` the remote file system.&quot;<p>Is that still true for sshfs ?<p>People used to ask us if they should rsync to us directly or sshfs mount and then rsync to the mount, and we told them not to do that since the original rsync stat would basically download all files simply to look at them &#x2F; size them.<p>But I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s the case anymore.  I think sshfs (or perhaps something about FUSE underneath) is smart about that now ... isn&#x27;t it ?