Hello, I use xmonad on a 512MB laptop. I noticed that using |showWName| (from XMonad.Layout.ShowWName) in my layoutHook slowed down Xmonad when switching between workspaces. I logged into #xmonad and enquired about it. Let me quote user geekosaur, who correctly diagnosed the problem: geekosaur "The XSync function flushes the output buffer and then waits until all requests have been received and processed by the X server." that's gonna hurt... geekosaur looks like a case of premature optimization, from the patch history So I deleted that particular call; workspace switching is more responsive after that (on my other machine, with more RAM, the difference is barely noticeable). I attach the .dpatch -Francesco