[$] Why glibc's fstat() is slow The https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/stat.2.html system call retrieves some of the metadata — owner, size, protections, timestamps, and so on — associated with an open file descriptor. One might not think of it as a performance-critical system call, but there are workloads that make a lot of fstat() calls; it is not something that should be slowed unnecessarily. As it turns out, though, the GNU C Library (glibc) has been doing exactly that, but a fix is in the works. https://lwn.net/Articles/944214/