FontConfig Hacking
Last night Keith Packard gave me commit access to fontconfig and I committed the first iteration of my patch, which reduces memory consumption and speeds up pattern matching by ensuring pattern keys are canonical. For my system, 25Kb was saved and strcmp called 25% less, which isn't bad for a patch which changes 6 lines.
The next step is to expand the scope of the patch to pattern values as well as keys. I have a working patch which reduces the memory footprint of fc-list by another 140Kb, but it's a little ugly at the moment.
NP: Buena Vista Social Club