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In my quest to achieve maximum performance from supposedly heavy-weight DE as KDE on my humble machine, I try several tips suggested by co-members viz. skip_argb_visuals, driver configuration, stop nepomuk/akonadi, upgrade QT etc. However, I can never really quantify the performance gain. I propose to build a utility that analyzes the performance of a KDE desktop by running some basic tests and output an absolute performance number. After doing some optimizations, I can again run the utility and see the change in the number so that I can better quantify the difference.
This can have additional side-effect of showing how upcoming releases stand performance wise compared to previous ones.

7 votes so far! Thats enough motivation for me

This utility would be on similar lines as glxgears(3d rendering index), Vista's Windows Performance Index (Queries hardware to show you how Vista would perform on a particular machine)
The intended utility should output a number by testing common DE functionalities
Eg.
- Open multiple application windows and observe latency.
- Smoothness of Drag/resize operations.

More suggestions are invited for defining the requirements of this program.