Comment 3 for bug 264313

Still reproducable on lucid.
~/ext is a symlink to /media/ext here which is a NFS mount.

strace ls --color=auto shows:
lstat64("ext", {st_mode=S_IFLNK|0777, st_size=10, ...}) = 0
readlink("ext", "/media/ext", 11) = 10
stat64("/media/ext",

the same while /media/ext is available gives:
lstat64("ext", {st_mode=S_IFLNK|0777, st_size=10, ...}) = 0
readlink("ext", "/media/ext", 11) = 10
stat64("/media/ext", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0777, st_size=4096, ...}) = 0

The lstat64 call is done for all files/dirs with --color=auto, while readlink() and stat64() only get called for symlinks.