Super simple bucket implementation for World of Warcraft addons, to deal with events which are too spammy for their own good.

wowbucket.lua

-- Here's a super-simple implementation of something like bucket events. The
-- idea is, you want to call some code, but the event you're listening to is
-- very spammy (many times per second!), and it's just not necessary to update
-- that often. So when the event first occurs, we start a timer to call the
-- actual routines. Subsequent occurances of the event simply fail silently
-- until the timer is finished. So your code only runs at most every N seconds
-- see: BUCKET_DELAY. Caveat: even if the event only runs once, there will be a
-- delay of N seconds before your routines get called. Tweak BUCKET_DELAY to
-- your needs. Caveat 2: you can't collect arguments (can be implemented, but
-- not trivially).

local BUCKET_DELAY = 1.0  -- Fire at most once per second

local function my_bucket()
  -- your routine
end

local throttle = 0
local tframe = CreateFrame('Frame')
tframe:SetScript('OnUpdate',function(self,elapsed)
  throttle = throttle + elapsed
  if throttle >= BUCKET_DELAY then
    throttle = 0
    self:Hide()
    my_bucket()  -- Do this last, so if there's an error, it doesn't prevent ending the timer
  end
end)

local function SOME_EVENT_CALLBACK()
  -- Your event callback.
  tframe:Show()  -- Start the timer if it's not already started
end