Booting FreeBSD on an EC2 c5.xlarge instance, the loader "twiddles" 810 times
over the course of 510 ms, a rate of 1.59 kHz. Even accepting that many systems
are slower than this particular VM and will take longer to boot (especially if using
spinning-rust disks), this seems like an unhelpfully large amount of twiddling when
compared to the ~60 Hz frame rate of many displays; printing the twiddles also
consumes roughly 10% of the boot time on the aforementioned VM.
Setting the default globaldiv to 16 dramatically reduces the time spent printing
twiddles to the console while still twiddling at roughly 100 Hz; this should be
ample even for systems which take longer to boot and consequently twiddle
slower.
Note that this can adjusted via the twiddle_divisor variable in loader.conf, but
that file is not processed until nearly halfway through the loader's runtime.