The times seem sublinear, 10k files is less than 10x 1k files.
I remember getting in to a situation during the ext2 and spinning rust days where production directories had 500k files. ls processes were slow enough to overload everything. ls -F saved me there.
And filesystems got a lot better at lots of files. What filesystem was used here?
It's interesting how well busybox fares, it's written for size not speed iirc?
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