Direct Path Export vs. Conventional Path Export

I recently switched our export backups to direct path and was impressed at the performance boost.

I did not set the recordlength (or buffer before with conventional path) and still am seeing a significant boost in performance. The docs mention these settings to boost performance.

In every case, the direct path is at least twice as fast and sometimes 3 times faster than the conventional path.

I assume I am missing something here because this seems too good to be true, so I looked up this in the docs.

I don't see any disadvantage other than you must use the same character set for the client exp session as the database character set, which I always do anyway.

Anyone have experience with this and can comment good or bad on direct path?

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