After spouting off about proper use of dpy, ioh I realized I wasn't walking my talk. I redid my symbol gen timing tests using ioh appropriately. What a difference. I can render 4,000 chars/sec now, a frame rate of 20 fps rendering 200 chars per frame. Pretty respectable, I could probably squeeze even more out with work. The character rendering itself takes ~140 usecs, I'm spending 100 usecs overhead per char with the setup, etc.
Bill