Ottavia was having some severe interaction latency today. Xorg was taking up >90% of the CPU, just sitting around. The machine was logged in to a desktop session with lots of graphical effects turned on. I changed the system default session to "gnome-fallback" in /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf, which was already set as the default for controls, but wouldn't get chosen for the autologin that happens on boot. 

Hopefully this helps ottavia stay usable...