I [Steven] remember when I was writing a portion of the Windows UI for Visual C++ and when I benchmarked against Borland C++ at the time, we were definitely faster (measured by seconds). However the reviews consistently mentioned Borland as being faster and providing feedback in the form of counts of lines compiled flying by. So I coded up a line count display that flashed a lot of numbers at you while compiling (literally flashy so it looked like it couldn’t keep up). In clock times it actually consumed a non-zero amount of time so we got „slower“ but the reviewers then started giving us credit for being faster. So in this case slower actually got faster.

Engineering Windows 7 : Continuing our discussion on performance

Schöne Anekdote über gefühlte Systemperformance.