OMM, looking at 700k files on a spinning disk, I'm getting an uncached run at 1m13s, and a cached run at 1.2 seconds.

That's "time find . | wc -l"

It's going to be disk limited unless you're in cache.

Switching to "time find . -printf '1' | wc -c" lowers overhead to .7 seconds, so roughly 1us/file.