Conky effectively uses the same data that top does.

Anyway, what iscio means is that when you have AIS installed, hildon-status-menu consumes enough system resources to show up in the list put out by top/conky, whereas in a normal system, hildon-status-menu is far more negligible.

This is, as far as I know, caused by the fact that AIS is uncompiled Python, which means that with AIS installed, hildon-status-menu's process includes within it the python interpreter and whatever ram+cpu that that takes up.

Hence it showing up higher in the list.