In the early days of working on my current main project, I found that updating a progress bar was slowing the process it was monitoring. Since there were times when it was useful to see near real-time progress, I added added a slider which allows the user to adjust the sampling rate. That slider is affectionately known (by me anyway) as the Heisenberg Compensator.

P.S. I have sped up my shit. That process originally took days, now it takes an hour.