Comment by a1369209993

I think the idea is that you're accessing files sparsely and/or randomly.

With the linux approach you avoid translating (from disk representation to syscall representation) metadata you don't need, and the in-memory disk cache saves having to re-read it (and some filesystems require a seek for each directory entry to read the inode data structure, which can also be avoided it you don't care about that particular stat).

With the windows approach, the kernel knows you want multiple files from the same directory, so it can send a (slightly more expensive) bulk stat request, using only one round trip[0]. On linux, the kernel doesn't know whether you're grabbing a.txt,b.txt,... (single directory-wide stat) or foo/.get,bar/.git,... (multiple single stats that could be pipelined) or just a single file, so it makes sense to use the cheapest request initially. If it then sees another stat in the same directory, it might make a bulk request, but that still incurred a extra round trip, and may have added useless processing overhead if you only needed two files.

TLDR: Access to distant memory is faster if assuptions can be made about your access patterns, access to local memory is faster if you access less of the local memory.

0: I'm aware of protocol-induced round trips, but I don't think it effects the reasoning.