originally, a few months ago, i switched to using the latest kernel from Kernel:/HEAD because Xorg was using too many CPU cycles, both with the nuevo and nvidia proprietary drivers. since then i’ve been happily installing every new kernel appearing in Kernel:/HEAD, re-compiling nvidia kernel modules from the .run file.
recently, i think since increasing git versions of kernels began to appear in the Kernel repo, i noticed that Xorg was using more CPU cycles again: up to 50% of my two CPUs. not as bad as it used to be, since the machine stayed responsive altogether, but still too much in my opinion.
yesterday i upgraded xorg-x11 to the latest version from the X11:/XOrg repo (Index of /repositories/X11:/XOrg ), version 7.5-133.1 as opposed to 7.5-11.3 from the OSS repo (11.3). since then Xorg only uses a fraction of the CPU cycles it used to, spiking to 17%, but normally staying below 1% (as shown by ksysguard).
that’s much better performance, without any unpleasant side effects. might be interesting for others who’s Xorg performance seems poor.
On a ‘related’ note, I note openSUSE-11.4 M4 has xorg-X11-7.5.43.
Some reviewers of openSUSE-11.4 M4 have suggested M4 is slightly more reponsive than 11.3 (I’m not quite ready to declare that myself, although subjectively it does ‘feel’ marginally faster).
There is some speculation that the 200-line kernel patch will be applied by SuSE-GmbH to the 11.4 kernel, and that also is purported to provide a speed up for TTY based applications.
Hence its possible that improved performance of 11.4 vs 11.3 may be an attractive feature of 11.4 (although again its too early to definitively say so now).
ahem, i wouldn’t recommend this right now since XOrg seems to be broken in factory & the X11 repo. i noticed this a few hours ago: X wouldn’t start anymore, complaining about ‘missing symbols’. there’s already a bug report here: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=656733, but as of this moment it’s still not working.
fortunately the ‘factory-tested’ repo has been created a few days ago, just in time for this situation. ‘zypper dup’ from (the OSS part) of this repo keeps factory useable; otherwise i’d have to revert to the last milestone (which of course isn’t so long ago).
it seems as if XOrg uses a few more CPU cycles than with my earlier, bleeding-edge XOrg version, but i’m not benchmarking anything, it’s just a very subjective impression, and everything is definitely useable.