Standard 'top' is not well suited for this. You should be using 'powertop' tool.
http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...3&postcount=21

I think Load Applet (this also goes for cpumem) isn't listening for or respecting the "status bar not visible" messages. While it was installed and the status bar wasn't present, top was reporting hildon-status-menu at a constant .7% and Xorg over 3%. Uninstalled, hildon-status-menu is back down to 0% and Xorg hovers near .9% (probably because of top updates). If someone doesn't take a look at Load Applet and cpumem within the next week, I will.

Hey smoku, how to open power top?

Also is it better than htop?

Oh, and by the way, the same goes for home widgets and other visual apps. They also need to listen for and respect the "not visible" messages.

if you end up runnin powertop do it following way

-close all apps
-open x-term and run it and before it starts do(there is little delay before monitoring starts):
-minimize window and go to desktop view
-switch n900 to locked state (screen off) and leave it on table for couple of minutes


-open it and post results/analyze it. You should be able to see states where cpu is and what process possibly wakes processor from sleep.

Hildon-desktop just went crazy again. I already save a powertop output when it was running fine. Now I took a powertop again. See the attachments in the bug report.

Note that all the source for hildon-desktop is freely available at http://maemo.gitorious.org/fremantle-hildon-desktop in case anyone wants to dive right into the code.

I can confirm I'm having the same problem. Uninstalling cpumem-applet has made things slightly better for me, in that it happens less frequently now, but I still get the hildon-desktop process occasionally idling with high cpu of about 12%

I was running into <4 hours of battery life AND the backside getting extremely warm - I have removed the Facebook Widget from my homescreen(have 4 enabled) and no warm backside and thus far still plenty of battery life left while being connected to Wi-Fi all day like I was when it was draining.

I can confirm the same problem, had hildon-desktop showing around 12% in Conky & htop, lots of CPU use in idle & fast battery drain shown by BatteryGraph.
I noticed it today after installing Catorise last night. Removed it this evening & on observing the hildon-desktop process in Conky, it will occasionally show 0.33% CPU, with very rare peaks reaching 1%.