gazzilion lookups when cd'ing into mountpoint + assuring responsiveness

Hi,
I've used sshfs with success in various previous use cases,
although I'm now having an issue I haven't seen before.
I mount the sshfs like so:
sshfs -d -o debug -o idmap=user $server:/home/dieter/public_html/master /home/dieter/workspaces/eclipse/master

I can ls the contents of the mountpoint well, and read files, but as soon as I want to cd into the mount,
sshfs seems to perform a LOOKUP/getattr for pretty much every single file contained within the remote
directory (recursively).
This causes the cd call to stall.

My other question is, how is responsiveness assured? I know sshfs performs predictive readahead and
caching, but when are caches invalidated?
Does sshfs use something like inotify?
I'm working on a remote codebase (editing it locally, but storing and running it remotely, although a full
local cache is acceptable)
and I'm considering two options.  One is just using sshfs.  The other one is more involved but possibly more responsive:
I would just do an initial rsync of the directory to my local pc, and then use inotify to perform an rsync to the
remote host when files change.

any thoughts?

thanks,
Dieter

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