August 7, 2026
When doing nothing becomes a flex
Assembly Hall of Shame
Coders are celebrating the slowest trick ever like it’s a world record disaster
TLDR: A programmer built a hall of fame for the slowest single computer commands, and the current winner stretches one tiny action to 62 seconds. Commenters are split between admiring the absurd skill, joking that “nop” should run everything, and blaming modern software for making powerful machines still feel sluggish.
In a plot twist absolutely nobody asked for, Assembly Hall of Shame is a competition to find the slowest possible single computer instruction—and the community is eating it up like a glorious nerd circus. Instead of making software faster, the project proudly chases the opposite: how badly can one tiny command be sabotaged? The current x86 champion reportedly drags out one instruction for 62 full seconds, which is the kind of number that makes normal people ask, “Wait, one instruction can take longer than microwaving leftovers?” Yes, apparently, if you really go out of your way to torment the machine.
And the comments? Pure delight. One reader instantly crowned it “a great resource for any performance deoptimization,” which is basically the perfect deadpan review for a hall of fame dedicated to losing. Another pointed out there’s real strategy here: many of the worst scores come from abusing weird edge cases and overloading parts of the computer that talk to hardware devices. Translation: this isn’t random chaos, it’s professional-grade mischief.
Then came the jokes. One commenter looked at the chart and concluded, with absolute galaxy-brain confidence, that we should “be using the nop instruction for everything” because it’s the fastest at doing nothing. Another used the whole spectacle to dunk on modern software bloat, joking that computers still somehow feel slow because programmers keep spending all that power on layers and layers of abstraction. And perhaps the biggest vibe-setting comment of all was the reveal that the same creator also made a compiler that only emits mov instructions and another tool designed to make debuggers display skulls and threats when disassembled. In other words: the community isn’t just reacting to a benchmark. They’re reacting to an artist of computational chaos.
Key Points
- •The article focuses on worst-case single-instruction latency rather than instruction-speed optimization.
- •The current x86 leader is `fxrstor64`, measured at 198,002,498,236 cycles, or about 62 seconds, on an AMD Ryzen 7 5800H.
- •The winning `fxrstor64` setup uses high-latency MMIO over PCIe plus contention from multiple hammering cores to delay completion.
- •The article defines benchmark rules, including scoring only one instruction, excluding interruptible instructions, normalizing by CPU base clock, and requiring stock hardware.
- •The x86 leaderboard excerpt includes entries such as `nop`, `nop16`, `rdtsc`, `idivq`, `enter`, `fldl`, `clflush`, `fsin`, and `mfence`, each paired with a strategy to maximize latency.