Ah, so it was that after all! I wonder what /notify does in my case then..
I can't see a way of making it any faster.
How about a true/false flag indicating whether there are any nick colour entries related to idle times at all? If not set, skip the 30-seconds check. Somewhat of a hack, but I'm willing to bet that most people don't use a combination of idletime-based and userlevel-based nick colouring...
