By not deduplicating files smaller than 1 KiB, we’d reduce the number of entries by 35%, which should already have a tangible impact on performance. It’d be a “mitigation” more than a “fix”, but it has a good work/reward ratio. We could conduct a similar analysis for #2. #3 is more difficult to implement because you cannot know the number of entries in .links until you’ve traversed it (note that currently deduplication stops when link(2) returns ENOSPC in .links). I’m attaching the script I’ve used for that, derived from an earlier experiment¹. You’re welcome to give it a spin! Thoughts? Ludo’. ¹ https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2014-09/msg00422.html