"writing 80 characters to the screen then 80 blanks and looping through that 20 times. The results are:
4 data pins 727 milliseconds
8 data pins 644 milliseconds"
so (80+80)*20 = 3200 characters in less than 3/4 of a second. your bar graph is one line long so either 20 or 40 characters. Lets say you have 40 chars. 727 *40/3200 = 9 milliseconds. Probably the rest of your code will be the limiting factor.
in the benchmark I print 80 character long strings. If you use a for loop and call once per character, of course it will go slower because of all the loop and call overhead. If you need maximum speed you might create an array of strings of different lengths for the different bar lengths.