When discussing how to speed up slow R code, my first question is what is your computer spec? It’s always surprised me that people are wondering why analysing big data is slow, yet they are using a five-year-old cheap laptop. Spending a few thousand pounds would often make their problems disappear. To quantify the impact of the CPU on analysis, I created the package {benchmarkme}. The aim of this package is to provide a set of benchmarks routines and data from past runs.