&gt; and you can do `du -sh` and see that all the files are taking up zero space.<p>That seems wrong to me. It would violate the assumptions of software that does <i>stat()</i> on directory entries and not only verifies presence but also non-zero size.<p>So it&#x27;s risking buggy behavior to gain a latency edge over other networked filesystems. I think smart prefetching while preserving correctness would be better.