Still, the huge number will make it very slow.

... the more with my stubborn graphics. My recent joy of getting the FLE to run lasted only until I realized the price: Inadvertently, I had switched back [sic!] to the current Linux kernel. With that, however nvidia doesn't see my 2nd monitor. That's why I had initially pinned the previous kernel to my system.

Anyway, I decided to sacrify that in favour of FLE. Until I opened blender the next time. In blender, even a mouse klick to any push button takes several seconds(!) for the button to change colour at all.

Blender's GUI is entirely based on OpenGL. I infer, that with graphic normally operational the GUI is done by the GPU, but now with crippled driver functionality the CPU must groan under that load, an 8 years old Core i3 duo.

But nor harm without good: thoughtless resource usage is noticeably penalized - which leads directly to your optimization credo. At the moment, I'm deliberately keeping my system in that condition.