At the end of last year this was implemented:

Sat Dec 30 05:27:19 2000  George Lebl <jirka@5z.com>

        * xstuff.[ch], global-keys.c, swallow.c:  Use gwmh for everything
          here, this greatly reduces the X traffic as the way things were
          done before was actually quite wasteful.

I hate to say it, but the way it's being done now is just as wasteful :(
there are multi-second delays and immense X traffic on this machine
whenever any window is manipulated in just about any way, which is,
well, a bit off. A profile of a ten second run consisting of

- starting panel
- kicking up an xterm and dragging it around the screen for a few seconds
- logging out of the panel

was

Each sample counts as 0.01 seconds.
  %   cumulative   self              self     total           
 time   seconds   seconds    calls  us/call  us/call  name    
 33.33      0.01     0.01    11778     0.85     0.85  check_client
 33.33      0.02     0.01       15   666.67  1333.33  hack_a_client_list
 33.33      0.03     0.01                             wm_protocol_check_support
  0.00      0.03     0.00     2142     0.00     4.67  find_input_client
  0.00      0.03     0.00     1309     0.00     0.00  get_typed_property_data
  0.00      0.03     0.00      396     0.00     0.00  panel_widget_get_type
  0.00      0.03     0.00      362     0.00     0.00  basep_widget_get_type
  0.00      0.03     0.00      314     0.00     0.00  button_widget_get_type
  0.00      0.03     0.00      256     0.00     0.00  do_grab_key

Note that the machine spent more than half of that ten seconds inside
panel when I wasn't doing anything that should have affected it
overmuch, especially since I'm running a non-GNOME-compliant window
manager (since the WM is the only thing that should concern itself with
the every-window case, IMHO)

If the code is to be believed, in that ten seconds XQueryTree() was
called *eleven thousand times*. No wonder the network was saturated :)

Might I suggest that the code for the GWMH_DESK_INFO_CLIENT_LIST in the
non-gnome-compliant-WM case needs a tiny bit of optimization? I don't
know this code at all, and I don't use the desk guide or anything else
that could benefit from this info, so I've just ripped the code out
completely... but if there's anything I can do to help eliminate this
horrible time sink, please say.


(I venture to suggest that this sink is *so* bad that nobody who's not
already using a GNOME-compliant WM would start to use the panel --- and
since new GNOME users don't necessarily have a GNOME-compliant WM, this
may be driving off a fair number of new users, and may explain a good
bit of the `GNOME is really slow' flamage that's out there. I thought it
was just ill-educated gunk, but this could explain a lot of it...)