This is my next major project: Cutting the delay between the system startup and when the X desktop is ready.

To that end, I found one suggestion on a Gnome project page that suggested this:

Running strace X revealed that the idle time was due to the X server attempting to connect to the font server: if the font path configured in the X server configuration file contains a reference to a font server and the font server is not running, the X server will attempt to connect to the font server 6 times, sleeping 1 second between attempts. … Removing the reference to the font server in the X server configuration file eliminated the idle time. …

Granted, I don’t have nearly the problems Gnome users have with startup times, but I thought it worth mentioning. Just for tweaking’s sake, I commented out the lines in my xorg.conf file that contained font paths.

There was no noticeable difference, though. Fonts were still displayed normally — or at least the Dejavu series, which is all I use — so there was no harm done. I’ll keep looking for now.