synchronize gnome applets update interval?

[Németh Márton]

Hi Aley, Carlos, Martin, Todd, Benoît and Davyd,

I'm using your gnome applets to monitor the following things on my laptop:
 - CPU temperature (sensors-applet, http://sensors-applet.sourceforge.net/ )
 - CPU usage (multiload-applet-2)
 - CPU frequency (cpufreq-applet)

My primary goal is to keep the CPU fan quiet as far as possible. This can
be achieved if the CPU temperature is kept low which depends on the CPU
usage and on CPU frequency.

Then I run powertop 1.13 ( http://www.lesswatts.org/projects/powertop/ )
to see what processes are causing wakeups. I realized that the applets I
run in order to have an overview on the CPU usage causes additional CPU wakeups.

So I modified the refresh interval of sensors-applet to 5.0s.
The cpufreq-applet does not have any possibility to reduce the update interval.
I also modified the default update interval of multiload-applet-2 to 5000ms.

As you can see I can set up two of the applets to wake up the CPU once in
5 seconds, but these two alone will wake up the CPU worst case every 2.5 seconds.

I don't know if there is any possibility to synchronize the gnome applets
so that they wakes up one after the other causing only one wakeup every 5 seconds.

Here is the list of software versions I used:

$ lsb_release -a
LSB Version:
core-2.0-ia32:core-2.0-noarch:core-3.0-ia32:core-3.0-noarch:core-3.1-ia32:core-3.1-noarch:core-3.2-ia32:core-3.2-noarch:cxx-3.0-ia32:cxx-3.0-noarch:cxx-3.1-ia32:cxx-3.1-noarch:cxx-3.2-ia32:cxx-3.2-noarch:desktop-3.1-ia32:desktop-3.1-noarch:desktop-3.2-ia32:desktop-3.2-noarch:graphics-2.0-ia32:graphics-2.0-noarch:graphics-3.0-ia32:graphics-3.0-noarch:graphics-3.1-ia32:graphics-3.1-noarch:graphics-3.2-ia32:graphics-3.2-noarch:qt4-3.1-ia32:qt4-3.1-noarch
Distributor ID: Debian
Description:    Debian GNU/Linux 6.0.4 (squeeze)
Release:        6.0.4
Codename:       squeeze
$ dpkg -l gnome-power-manager gnome-applets sensors-applet
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name                             Version                          Description
+++-================================-================================-================================================================================
ii  gnome-applets                    2.30.0-3                         Various applets for the GNOME panel - binary files
ii  gnome-power-manager              2.32.0-2                         power management tool for the GNOME desktop
ii  sensors-applet                   2.2.5-4                          Display readings from hardware sensors in your Gnome panel

Regards,

	Márton Németh