Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think the CI issue is due to my patch.

@bgamari Ahh. Thanks for investigating this. I was wondering why CPU usage was so high. Thanks for doing the legwork to track this down.

@bgamari I'm not convinced this is what is causing taffybar's high cpu usage.

As far as I can tell, taffybar only attempts interface updates when there is an actual change.

What led you to the conclusion that this was the cause?

@IvanMalison I observed a marked reduction in taffybar's CPU usage and wakeup count after applying this patch. Note that I still consider taffybar's CPU usage to be too high: I still see it saturate a good fraction of a CPU when switching desktops and a pretty minimal configuration still idles around 3%. However, this patch certainly helped and I'm afraid I don't have time to look farther at the moment.

Note that I still consider taffybar's CPU usage to be too high: I still see it saturate a good fraction of a CPU when switching desktops and a pretty minimal configuration

Yes, I agree, this is likely due to the fact that taffybar simply redraws the entire workspace widget on any ewmh update. It shouldn't be too hard to have it avoiding redraws for window icons when nothing has changed.

minimal configuration still idles around 3%.

If I remove the clock and graph widgets i get 0% idle. I know you said that you don't have time to investigate, but could you try disabling those widgets and seeing if you see the same thing?

Continue discussion at taffybar/taffybar#385 to avoid spamming xmonad-contrib

LGTM 👍

Is there a reason this hasn't been merged?

No reason, just not enough round tuits to go round, I guess...