X performance woes

[Hal Burgiss]

After upgrading to 8.10 I am still having awful X performance issues.
The worst is of course in Firefox, but I have very similar problems if
I switch to Opera, so its not just Firefox. And its not just my system
since most of this is just since the upgrade. Can anyone explain why
simply *typing* in a browser text field can consistently spike the CPU
to 100%. Its close to unusuable. I am reluctant to scroll pages, as I
will enter the land of "watching paint dry" while the load triggered
case fan sounds like its in a nascar race. 

Noothing happening now, normal process list:

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND                                  
 8887 halb      20   0  381m 226m  24m S  3.8 22.6  10:36.79 firefox                                  
13548 root      20   0  423m  62m 7320 S  3.8  6.2 663:33.21 Xorg                                     
 4311 halb      20   0  133m  23m  13m S  1.9  2.3   0:52.76 konsole                                  
13760 halb      39  19 32816 5760 2496 S  1.9  0.6 133:05.88 trackerd                                 
    1 root      20   0  3056  560  504 S  0.0  0.1   0:02.62 init                                     
    2 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kthreadd
    3 root      RT  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 migration/0
    4 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   3:29.32 ksoftirqd/0

Now, a minute later while typing in a text field (twitter.com):

 PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND                                  
13548 root      20   0  423m  62m 7320 R 51.1  6.2 663:34.85 Xorg                                     
 8887 halb      20   0  381m 226m  24m R 47.1 22.6  10:38.51 firefox                                  
13760 halb      39  19 32816 5760 2496 S  2.0  0.6 133:06.46 trackerd                                 
    1 root      20   0  3056  560  504 S  0.0  0.1   0:02.62 init                                     
    2 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kthreadd                                 
    3 root      RT  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 migration/0                              
    4 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   3:29.32 ksoftirqd/0                              
    5 root      RT  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 watchdog/0            

That load is from the *keyboard*. Madness! It stays like that until
after I stop typing. I have disabled addons, changed config settings,
etc, but it does not help significantly. Opera is just as bad so I
don't think its just Firefox bloat. Epiphany if anything is worse. I
switched from gnome to xfce and that helped greatly with some
performance issues, but something is still right royally fubared. 

-- 
Hal