I was looking into the instancing methods in Houdini and found that there is
the instance node in the obj level and the copy to point (pack and instance)
way of creating a large number of objects with low memory.

Is the instance node in OBJ network just left there for backwards compatibility
or is there a benefit for using the OBJ node?
Is there a disadvantage of using the SOP copy to points instance?

Also is there any examples for the "instance" node (the actual node not "copy to points") in SOP?

Thanks in advance.

This is an old file, but it demonstrates the speed of the Instance node.
https://forums.odforce.net/topic/23294-houdini-16-wishlist/?do=findComment&comment=143811 [forums.odforce.net]

Cheers for the file Enivob

I had used the hip file that you have provided and found that 25,000,000 instances for the
copy stamp node (SOP) will take: 3mins 50sec
instance node (OBJ) node will take: 2mins 53secs
and copy to points node (SOP): 26 secs
though my computer is beefy it seems like that copy to points node is much faster.

Also, it seems as though the instance node [www.sidefx.com] in the sop level is
just an HDA which wraps the copy stamp node neatly inside which allows you to either reference a file path or
geo inside the current file using any given string attrib such as "@geofile" to a point to an geo node.
eg. s@geofile= "op:/obj/copy_crystal/object_merge4";
instance node (sop) -> Instance Attribute -> "geofile"

Is there any reason to use those nodes over the copy to point node to instance?