Thanks for bringing it up, we will look into it.

That's a good tip, thank you! It does indeed speed it up.

For personal use, I also use ListPlot. But when I show those plots to others, I get increasingly common complaints that they are not readable enough, etc. Thus I am compelled to produce a barchart-style thing.

In the meantime I found this suggestion to use WeightedData. One need to take special care to line up the bins carefully between the steps of the procedure, but this works:

data = RandomVariate[ExponentialDistribution[1], 5000000];

bins = Sequence[0, 18, 0.5];

Histogram[data, {bins}, {"Log", "Count"}, 
  PlotRange -> All] // AbsoluteTiming

Histogram[
  WeightedData[MovingAverage[Range[bins], 2], BinCounts[data, {bins}]],
  {bins}, {"Log", "Count"}
  ] // AbsoluteTiming

![enter image description here][1]

Luckily it doesn't prevent me from using logarithmic vertical scaling easily