I think the final statement tells the tale: benchmarks against alpha or beta code are inconclusive -- I know when I have distributed such pre-release code for my products, there has often been a lot of "logging" / "debug" code still in place to aid in the testing process and give more details about what is happening.

Let's try again with the final release.

BTW -- my personal observation is that the Intellisense is much quicker on 9 than 8.