After a few more reboots, it seems my login delay went away.
NOTE: I did not install elogind, and I didn't change my xorg.conf file.  I really didn't change anything trying to resolve it.
I may look into these things if the issue comes back, but for now I am good.

In fact, really good!

I just noticed that with my base desktop session (3 terminals, total of 9 terminal tabs) and my browser (palemoon) running with just this forum, I am using < 1GB of RAM.

Here are my top ten from ps_mem.py

13.9 MiB +   1.3 MiB =  15.2 MiB    panel-1-whisker
16.0 MiB + 774.5 KiB =  16.7 MiB    redshift-gtk
13.8 MiB +   4.5 MiB =  18.3 MiB    qasmixer
15.8 MiB +   3.9 MiB =  19.7 MiB    flameshot
18.4 MiB +   4.2 MiB =  22.7 MiB    Thunar
22.5 MiB +   3.2 MiB =  25.7 MiB    xfce4-terminal
27.3 MiB +   2.0 MiB =  29.3 MiB    gerbera
30.3 MiB +   8.6 MiB =  38.9 MiB    xfdesktop
38.8 MiB +  10.5 MiB =  49.3 MiB    Xorg
307.4 MiB +   3.8 MiB = 311.2 MiB    palemoon
---------------------------------
                        710.2 MiB
=============

Without the browser running it was at 441.5MiB.  Very pleased about that.
I use XFCE because I prefer it. Everyone talks about how it is great for old computers with low resources, which is certainly true.  But it's not all just XFCE though, because Devuan certainly has something to do with that as well.  49MB for Xorg seems to be about 1/2 of what I have seen of other XFCE based distros.  Maybe they just come with lots of things enabled by default.  Not trying to tweak out every bit of memory, just happy with the way Devuan performs.

FYI, since I mentioned serviio previously, I thought I'd add that gerbera made the list because the newest version of serviio wasn't recognized by some of my devices, and after some troubleshooting I decided to install gerbera (another dlna server) alongside it as a test.  It is lighter weight, doesn't use java, and everything could see it.  So I'm using that now, and serviio has been disabled.

mweishaar wrote:

you're saying I don't need an xorg.conf, and I do need elogind?

Yes, that's right. I can't confirm anything about NVIDIA personally (I wouldn't give money to those bastards) but I know that elogind is needed.

Well, I haven't bought a new video card... ever.  So technically Nvidia didn't get my money. 
Now cards are so huge I had to get something that would fit in my mini tower.  Nvidia drivers are quite a PITA sometimes. 

Interesting about elogind.  Prior to doing my upgrade, I created a vm with a base install of ascii, and another with a base install of beowulf. Then I did a dist-upgrade on ascii so it's on beowulf now.  The ascii-upgraded one doesn't have elogind installed, but the beowulf-install one does.

So I would expect that elogind isn't required, as my system is operating without it.  But it does seem that I can install it without much risk since a fresh install uses it.

Definitely.

you're saying I don't need an xorg.conf, and I do need elogind?

Yes, that's right. I can't confirm anything about NVIDIA personally (I wouldn't give money to those bastards) but I know that elogind is needed.

The only constant is change

Cripes....I swear, sometimes I feel ancient with newer distros. 

I am not sure I understand your comment about not needing an xorg.conf file.

I mean that you don't need an xorg.conf file. The NVIDIA proprietary drivers are now detected and autoconfigured by the X server.

Not according to that output — rc indicates that the package is not installed but the configuration files are.

elogind is installed

weishaar@devuan:~$ dpkg -l | grep elogind
rc  elogind                                234.4-2                                     amd64        user, seat and session management daemon
rc  libpam-elogind:amd64                   234.4-2                                     amd64        elogind PAM module

Using "X -configure" gave me what looked like a good xorg.conf file, but then X wouldn't start claiming the number of screens didn't match my hardware.  I copied over the xorg.conf file that I had backed up before the upgrade, and all was good with X.

You shouldn't need an X.Org configuration file at all any more, even if you're using the proprietary NVIDIA drivers.

In respect of your desktop delay, please confirm that elogind is installed.

So I finally took the plunge and upgraded from ascii to beowulf.  First off - I still remember doing upgrades back on RedHat 5.1, so I've been doing this a while.  Linux upgrades sure have come a long way!

My first issue was that I had held back all nvidia packages, so I had to take those off hold before I could get dist-upgrade to start.  Not a problem really, but a hurdle.

==============
FIXED ISSUES (worth mentioning):
dist-upgrade went fine, no real surprises until the end.  There was some issue with the nvidia driver.  A reboot might fix it.  It did not.
No X server.  Tried quite a few things to get it going, I had part of driver 390 installed and part of 418.  I ended up uninstalling all the nvidia drivers, and then trying nouveau.  No go.  So reinstalled only the latest nvidia.  Using "X -configure" gave me what looked like a good xorg.conf file, but then X wouldn't start claiming the number of screens didn't match my hardware.  I copied over the xorg.conf file that I had backed up before the upgrade, and all was good with X.

Next issue was slim.  It was gone.  I had done the auto-cleanup per the instructions, so maybe that got rid of it?!  Installed it, then I was back up and running in XFCE. 

Pulseaudio wasn't running.  Long story short... I fixed it by launching pulseaudio via autostart and disabling start-pulseaudio-x11 which didn't seem to be working.  Then I found the right answer in the release notes. D'oh! 

sendmail was taking 60 seconds to start on boot.  I know I had seen this in the distant past and fixed it.  Just needed to update my hosts file appropriately to have the non-fully-qualified hostname as the first line.  Which I already had in ascii and it didn't change, just needed to change the format a little.
(ascii) 127.0.0.1    localhost ip4-localhost ip4-loopback
(beowulf) 127.0.0.1    devuan devuan.localdomain

I run serviio as a dlna server.  It wasn't working anymore.  Messed around with it a bit, then just installed the latest version and default-jre (missing) and it's back.

Was getting an error in syslog from console-kit-daemon about cgmanager not running.  It wasn't installed, so I installed it.

VLC was gone, as was Handbrake.  Re-installed them.

==============
UNSOLVED ISSUE:
I see a 30 second delay before the desktop comes up.  Here is the relevant portion from syslog:
...
Jul  4 10:24:24 devuan avahi-daemon[2001]: Server startup complete. Host name is devuan.local. Local service cookie is 2967303762.
Jul  4 10:24:26 devuan kernel: [   13.476220] resource sanity check: requesting [mem 0x000e0000-0x000fffff], which spans more than PCI Bus 0000:00 [mem 0x000e0000-0x000e3fff window]
Jul  4 10:24:26 devuan kernel: [   13.476373] caller _nv029707rm+0x58/0x90 [nvidia] mapping multiple BARs
Jul  4 10:24:26 devuan kernel: [   13.770321] resource sanity check: requesting [mem 0x000c0000-0x000fffff], which spans more than PCI Bus 0000:00 [mem 0x000d4000-0x000d7fff window]
Jul  4 10:24:26 devuan kernel: [   13.770476] caller _nv000935rm+0x1bf/0x1f0 [nvidia] mapping multiple BARs

**** Note the 33 second delay here.  Did some googling, but no real answer yet.

Jul  4 10:24:59 devuan dbus-daemon[1976]: [system] Activating service name='org.freedesktop.ConsoleKit' requested by ':1.7' (uid=0 pid=2268 comm="/usr/bin/slim -d ") (using servicehelper)
Jul  4 10:24:59 devuan dbus-daemon[1976]: [system] Activating service name='org.freedesktop.PolicyKit1' requested by ':1.8' (uid=0 pid=2606 comm="/usr/sbin/console-kit-daemon --no-daemon ") (using servicehelper)
...

==============

Kind of annoying, but I honestly restart my machine every couple of months, so not a huge deal.
Other than these few hurdles, everything seems to be running great.  Somehow, memory usage is even lower than it was on ascii.   I didn't take a "before" snapshot, but I know it's lower by quite a bit.
 
Right now as I type this I am only using 1.5 GiB of RAM !  Here are the top 10 users from ps_mem.py

12.6 MiB +   3.1 MiB =  15.7 MiB    xfce4-panel
17.6 MiB + 943.5 KiB =  18.5 MiB    libvirtd
17.5 MiB +   3.3 MiB =  20.8 MiB    xfce4-terminal   (3 terminals with 4 tabs in each)
14.2 MiB +   9.1 MiB =  23.3 MiB    flameshot
20.9 MiB +   2.4 MiB =  23.3 MiB    redshift-gtk
14.5 MiB +   9.6 MiB =  24.1 MiB    qasmixer
43.9 MiB +  19.2 MiB =  63.1 MiB    Xorg
53.4 MiB +  17.2 MiB =  70.6 MiB    xfdesktop
386.1 MiB + 334.5 KiB = 386.4 MiB    java
690.9 MiB +   5.4 MiB = 696.3 MiB    palemoon   (7 tabs open)
---------------------------------
                          1.5 GiB   

I may run into a few more things here and there that aren't quite right, but I shouldn't have any issues resolving them.
Overall, Beowulf gets an A from me!