An ordering called "faster" is defined on the class of iterative program schemata. It is in good accordance with the intuition of "better" applied to program schemata. Many of the commonly used optimization techniques yield "faster" programs in this sense. For Ianov schemata the relation "faster" is decidable, but even on strong equivalence classes the ordering may be very complicated. For iterative program schemata there is a certain kind of speedup. Whereas there is an arbitrary slowdown for programs, slowdown for program schemata is limited.