In an effort to shave a couple minutes off of a build process, back when everyone was still drunk on XML, I got into a conversation with one of the webmasters at W3C. A lot of people forget to cache public schemas and DTDs because the libraries don't by default and the setting is a bit buried.

We were trying to convince him to sandbag responses a bit. I never followed up but it sounded like we almost had him convinced. My thinking was, I didn't notice the problem until we hit almost 2 minutes. If their website hadn't been so fast I probably would have identified the problem months earlier. Essentially his team were being punished for being so damned good at their jobs.

I wonder how palatable it would be to slowly ramp up a pause in the compiler for "No, really, you need to stop doing this, and soon" types of misfeatures. Not a huge one, just enough so people really notice.