Tried, and personally I saw no performance gains yet (I only tried a
little drawing and opening one complex file).


Actually it's expectable result. sK1 uses Cairo renderer almost 4 years
and when I hear "new Cairo becomes 2x faster" I'm expecting 10%
total performance increasing, no more. 

Nevertheless, it would be interesting to test Caro 1.9.x branch.

Regards,

Igor Novikov
sK1 Project
http://sk1project.org