Presumably, with async you could queue all the `stat`-ops after the dir walk at once, leaving the total latency in the ball park of "dir walk"+"ping for file stat"+"ping remaining symlink stats if present". But I don't think `ls` does this.

Otherwise, yeah, you incur network latency on every file, plus, as you say, symlink "pings" if those are present. So its "dir walk"+"number of files"*"ping"+"symlinks"*"ping", which adds up.

Batching high-latency ops is one of the only cases where I like async.