If you had an experience anything like mine, the iOS 5 update was a complete pain in the ass. Not only did the process take hours but it failed halfway to completion and had to be restarted. All in all, it was truly an alcohol-requiring experience.

And that’s if your update worked at all – as demonstrated by the people still taking to Twitter to voice their frustrations about the broken process. It looks like things are improving as of now and you should be able to get iOS if you were unable to last night.

And there’s good news once you apply the update: It’s probably going to make your Apple device run faster.

Geoffrey Goetz at GigaOm used four different performance tests to gauge the performance of the new iOS 5 on various Apple devices. He ran the test on an iPad Wi-Fi, and iPod Touch 4th gen, an iPhone 4 and an iPad 2 3G.

What he found was that iOS 5 actually boosted performance on all of the devices – more so on the newer devices than the older device (iPad 1).

Not shown above, iOS 5 performed better in some test on the iPad 1 and on all but two tests on the iPod touch.

It’s pretty amazing to see a huge OS release like this improve the speed of devices – especially a new OS that packs over 200 new features. So if you can get the iOS 5 update right now, you definitely should.