Is "some wallet refresh performance work" something that you want to finish optimizing before 0.9 is tagged and released?
I'm done with it for now. I'd seen someone mentioning it was slow, so I had a look. It doesn't look particularly slow here, but it might be because I'm on a SSD. We'll see what people think.
It took me about 7 min to refresh a wallet that was 100,000 blocks behind on a 2 TB HDD. So I can see why this could be an issue for someone to has an old HDD hard drive say about 200 GB since HDD seek time for a given spin rotation basically falls with size. I would expect about 70 min for a 200 GB HDD to refresh 100,000 blocks. Still I would not hold up 0.9 over this since there are simple fixes for a user.
1) Get an SSD or a large HDD.
2) Refresh the wallet on a regular basis rather than wait a few months as I just did.
Edit: OS Trisquel GNU/Linux 7, Processor Core 2 Quad 6600 @ 2.4 GHz (about 7 years old) RAM 8 GB DDR 2 Motherboard Asus P5N-D. Monero Version: 0.8.8.7-107eeaf