Comment 3 for bug 113440

> I had been monitoring cpu usage and every 1 sec, my cpu usage % would spike to 70-80%, I ran a "top" and located the spike.... Xfce-4 battery -p. The battery monitor is just really sucking alot of cpu usage for such a small app.

CPU usage can disturb other applications, but when it comes to what kind of behavior drains battery most (once kernel uses dynticks and can make HW to sleep when it's not used), it's how often something wakes and how long.

For example SDL programs might look completely idle when they are not doing anything (use 0% CPU according to top), but in reality they are are polling the system (very quickly) several times a second.

In this case I think the main problem is that the thing wakes up once a sec. Battery state doesn't change that fast and plugging in a charger could/should send an event about it...