Does cloning offer any performance boost?

Questions
1

This might be a noob question but I haven’t seen any actual confirmation on this.

Cloning doesn’t save drawcalls like instancing does, so I’m wondering if there’s any real performance benefit, apart from not having to load a model from disk again.

2

The cloning does create a new mesh, actually:

public clone(name: string = "", newParent: Nullable<Node> = null, 
  doNotCloneChildren?: boolean, clonePhysicsImpostor: boolean = true): Mesh {
    return new Mesh(name, this.getScene(), newParent, this, doNotCloneChildren,
                          clonePhysicsImpostor);
}

The performance gain is a memory one: the geometry is shared between the source mesh and the clone(s).

3

Ah right! Thanks for clearing that up.