Whether you're trying to avoid premature optimisation, or just don't care, software is always as slow as it can be. You only tune it when you notice a problem.

Whether you're trying to avoid premature optimisation, or just don't care, software is always as slow as it can be. You only tune it when you notice a problem. The only way to make software reliably run 'fast' is to run it on old hardware, and even then that won't catch problems like this that don't appear until a special condition is met. In this case I can believe the machines this program was tested on at MS had a lot less than 44'000 files. Should they have known to test with more files? I wouldn't have. To ensure quality, Microsoft also need to make bug reporting easy and effective. But unfortunately that's a herculean task with so many users. I'm guessing most actual bug fixes are a result of big companies with support contracts complaining. And how many of those are going to know or care about the microphone app?