First of all, sudo aptitude install mesa-utils. Then run in a Terminal/Konsole glxgears, and wait for ~15 seconds; if your FPS is ~400 or less, then you do have sluggish video performance (usually manifesting itself as slow scrolling in Firefox/Iceweasel, slow window switching/minimziing/maximizing etc).

After reading through several forums and bug reports and blog posts, I’ve ended with the following modifications to my /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

1. backup your current xorg.conf: sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.before-exa
2. open your /etc/X11/xorg.conf with a favourite editor; I’ve added these lines to section “module”:
   

   Load “dbe”
   Load “xtrap”
   Load “record”
   Load “GLcore”

   These are not really performance-related and could be skipped; I’m giving them here, because they were suggested as default entries by dexconf or some other xorg.conf-generator utility. Again – they are not supposed to improve performance, so you can skip these.

3. my “Device” section is now:
   

   Section “Device”
   Identifier “Intel Corporation 82915G/GV/910GL Integrated Graphics Controller”
   BoardName “82915G/GV/910GL Integrated Graphics Controller”
   Vendorname “Intel Corporation”
   #Driver “i810″
   Driver “intel”
   BusID “PCI:0:2:0″
   Option “DRI” “true”
   Option “AccelMethod” “exa”
   Option “MigrationHeuristic” “greedy”
   Option “ExaNoComposite” “false”
   EndSection

   Driver i810 (xserver-xorg-video-i810 package) was about 10-20 FPS slower than Driver intel (xserver-xorg-video-intel package) for me. The most important lines here are Option AccelMethod exa (which enables EXA acceleration instead of the older XAA; if you run 2.6.28 or later kernel, you can try UXA instead of EXA) and Option MigrationHeuristic greedy. Option ExaNoComposite false doesn’t make a difference for me, and Option DRI true might be redundant (didn’t bother trying to remove it).

4. at the end of xorg.conf I have two more sections:
   

   Section “DRI”
   Mode 0666
   EndSection

   Section “Extensions”
   Option “Composite” “enable”
   Option “MIT-SHM” “Yes”
   EndSection

5. sudo nano /etc/environment, and add one line: INTEL_BATCH=1 (if you have graphics stability issues or screen corruption – try removing this change first)
6. you can test if your xorg.conf is syntactically correct by running X -config /etc/X11/xorg.conf (provided that you edited this exact file)

This is it. Before these modifications, my FPS in glxgears was around 430; after these modifications it is ~915.

As time permits, I might try the XAA configuration, suggested at foolcontrol.

Update: with compiz enabled, XAA configuration recommended at foolcontrol is definitely faster in 2D.

Improvements, suggestions, corrections are welcome.

Update 7: I’m now quite satisfied with page generation times. See other updates at the end of the post and comments to find out more.
Update 8: this blog is not at godaddy anymore for the reasons which have nothing to do with speed.

I’m currently using GoDaddy shared hosting plan. I noticed that my blog, as it grows in popularity and visitors, displays a wide range of page-response times. The best I had seen so far was below 3 seconds of page generation time (note: _not_ page loading, but page generation). If it were the average, I would be happy. However, much more frequently observed times are in range of 20-30 seconds per page. Sometimes pages even timeout, as my uptime tracker service is reporting (For February, there were 100 minutes of unresponsive pages, for March – already over 10 hours!!!).

For example, today around 16:00 GMT the following statistics were reported by my blog:

22 queries.
33.416 seconds.

Evidently, this is unacceptably slow.

Based on that same tracker, when plain-html file was tracked, no downtime was observed. It was only after I started tracking the PHP-generated file, that “downtimes” became obvious. Evidently, CPU is not powerful enough to handle all the processing from multiple shared-hosting accounts at GoDaddy server(?s), thus time-outs are observed.

I used the reverse-IP tool from domaintools.com to find out, that

There are 3707 domains hosted on this IP address.
Here are a few of them:

1. 100-downloads.com
2. 101artisanlane.com
3. 107threnegades.net

(Well, with 100GB storage and 1TB traffic I think I could have the 100-downloads-like web-site, but only based on pure-html pages, with no scripting at all. With scripting, that would be a dead site, deducing from my blog’s page generation speeds.)

(You could also try an alternative reverse-IP tool)

I will contact GoDaddy support with the “slow page generation, low CPU?” question to see if anything can be done. So far I’m satisifed with GoDaddy, even as my demands continue to grow since 2005. With static pages I think there would be no problems, but who uses static pages nowadays?

Meanwhile, I found the Linux Tera-Host hosting plan from hostican attractive, as for 10$/month. Well, “unlimited bandwidth” does look slightly suspicious, as it can be 40kbit/sec “unlimited” :). Please comment if you had any previous experience with hostican… or with decreasing page-generation times on GoDaddy shared hosting.

Update: after I contacted GoDaddy support with “slow page generation”, the page generation speed actually increased. So far the timings for a single page generation are within 1-10 seconds, and I do not get any more “downtimes” in my hosting uptime tracker. However, communication with support did not reveal anything new concerning my question. As long as page generation times do not increase, I’ll archive and forget about this problem. (…doubting that any other shared hosting provider will ensure enough CPU to get less-than-a-second-per-page times.)

Update 2: there’s also more important information about GoDaddy hosting, namely about their scheme of preventing one shared hosting user eating up 100% of system resources.

Update 3: as of January 31, 2008, there are 2924 domains hosted on my shared hosting server (according to reverse-IP tool).

Update 4: as of April 6, 2008, there are 2834 domains hosted on the server with the same IP as mine. I must add that it seems as though since that short MySQL outage everything is faster at GoDaddy shared hosting. Did they upgrade database server(s)? I have no idea, but I like the change.

Update 5: as of June 3, 2008, there are 2754 domains hosted on my shared hosting server at GoDaddy.

Update 6: as of July 16, 2008, there are 2697 domains hosted on my shared hosting server at GoDaddy. Moreover, the Deluxe shared hosting plan now has 1.5 times higher disk and bandwidth limits, and 5 times more FTP users per account. Page generation times have improved noticeably, though some slowdowns in the peak hours can be still observed.