I saw from another thread (Page generation performance expectations?), that they recommend using a copy operation on the content folder as a benchmark to see how much time is lost due to I/O. I tried it out on my machine and it looks like I/O is indeed the bottleneck, I can’t do anything about that.
time cp -r content content.test
real 1m50.044s
user 0m0.359s
sys 0m28.250s
Anyway, in that case, I’ll consider the 2ms per page as a reasonable target to aim for while optimizing my theme.
Thanks!