HSRP can be Super-Fast

An interesting thing I recently learned was that HSRP can be fine-tuned to be much much faster than the open standard VRRP. You can simply adjust the default timers. To match the speed of VRRP, you can change the hello timer to 1 second and the holddown timer to a value of 3. The default values for HSRP are hello=3 secs and holddown=10 secs.
To really ramp up the speed of the failover, you can define the timers in milliseconds! This will generate a ton of traffic between your devices but that's usually OK because most likely you will be using 100MBPS or even 1Gbps redundant links.
Here is the command to adjust the timers:
Switch(config-if)# standby timers [msec] [msec]