Performance sort of has a paradoxical "coffee test": something that takes a few seconds is aggravating and you will wait for it but something that routinely tak

Performance sort of has a paradoxical "coffee test": something that takes a few seconds is aggravating and you will wait for it but something that routinely takes 5 minutes will make you go get coffee or switch tasks completely. With enough alternate tasks, waits are absorbed. Oddly, overall throughput can be worse with sporadic tiny delays that are technically indicative of a fast task. You don't just want fast operations, you want programs that can be smart about gathering unavoidable delays into chunks. This can even pay dividends when consuming resources, as the gathered steps may use less (e.g. laptop wakes dormant hardware just once to perform several grouped tasks, instead of repeatedly over a short time frame).