General CPU usage question

[Nickolai Dobrynin <ndobrynin gmail com>]

I'm sure this question has been asked before, so maybe just point me
to the right place where I could look.

Suppose, as a simple example, I am setting the bg color of a
GtkEventBox and suppose there is a lot of redundancy, meaning that,
say, I set the background color to red when it's already red.  In
practice, this often happens when you do not do any internal tracking
that would minimize the number of GUI calls you make.

My questions is: does this increase the CPU usage?  Is it possible,
for example, that Gtk tracks things down internally and doesn't
physically update the color when the color requested is the same?

More generally, should redundancy be explicitly avoided, or Gtk avoids
it internally?


Thanks,

Nickolai