I remember spending two days hunting a bug in my Turbo Pascal code when I upgraded from a 286 machine (12Mhz) to my a Pentium-66. It was a while loop with one

I remember spending two days hunting a bug in my Turbo Pascal code when I upgraded from a 286 machine (12Mhz) to my a Pentium-66. It was a while loop with one extra zero at the end. The loop with the bug run in twos second in the 286. Easy to notice. In the Pentium it didn't run in the blink of an eye. This way of benchmarking performance, with human wall clock time, makes performance problems add up: They add up faster, the faster your development machine is. I guess a good benchmarck would be number of cycles run; but if the software runs fast enough it's hard to justify working more time on it unless there a business need to do it faster (like you're billed by milisecond, by intruction run like in a blockchain, or it is part of the core layer of your product and performance matters to capture market share).