Performance of simple Labels has been dropped significantly after switching to Modena (b86).
I wrote simple test case which draws different set of labels on every pulse.
Here are performance results on my Windows laptop:
 b85: 255 fps
 b86: 185 fps // Modena is by default
 b87: 150 fps
 b88: 125 fps
 b89: 125 fps


JPA shows that significant time increase (more than in 2 times) is observed in
  com.sun.javafx.css.StyleManager.findMatchingStyles(...).

On 5/13/13 5:22 PM, David Grieve wrote:
> The issue is that modena.css has css rules with multiple selectors and the css code is not optimized around that.
> So this is a known issue, but there is no bug tracking it.