4.5ms on what hardware, in what scenario? Would I like to save 5ms off the startup time of my VMs? You betcha. Does that 5ms turn into 200ms on a low power device? Probably
How would you even discern this delay from all the other delays happening before you're done booting, when there are so many other natural variances of a couple of milliseconds here and there? Every "on metal" boot is unique, no two are exactly as fast, and certainly never within 1.98 milliseconds of eachother even in the case of a VM with lots of spare resources on the host. You're painting a too pretty picture of this.
Right, but again pointing this at most people on this forum, that answer is probably the same. Very few of us are in a situation where this can save seconds a year, much less seconds a month.
For the folks this could potentially save time, I'm curious if it is better than taking an alternative route. Would be delighted to see an analysis showing impact.
And again, kudos to the folks for possibly speeding this up. I'm assuming qsort or some such will be faster, but that isn't a given. For that matter, if it is being sorted so that searches are faster later, than the number of searches should be considered, as you could probably switch out to sentinel scanning to save the sort time, and then you are down to how many scans you are doing times the number of elements you are looking against.