Fastest recursive search for files

From this answer, I learned that dir can search recursively for files in subdirectories, and it is about 3X faster than what I had been using earlier, getfilenames. However now I am searching a remote directory containing many subdirectories with thousands of files, and the dir command takes 30+ minutes to execute. Is there a faster way? I am happy to call something outside of Matlab, like find in the accepted answer here.