Whats the overhead of this daemon running all the time?
It uses RAM which effectively increases power consumption because now something else is pushed out of the cache. It polls therefore waking the CPU every few seconds, even if perhaps nothing else is going on on the machine and the CPU would otherwise be idle.
I wonder if its benefits outweigh the disadvantages. Would be good to have numbers for a bunch of different hardware configs...
It's true it doesn't use much CPU in percentage terms... but wakeups are expensive.
When I'm reading a web page, ideally my CPU is halted, using barely any power. With the screen dim, I might be hoping for 20 hours battery life in that state.
To wake up, just to poll something, and go back to sleep again uses a lot of energy compared to doing nothing. Something polling a few times a second might reduce my 20 hours down to just 10.
I wonder if its benefits outweigh the disadvantages. Would be good to have numbers for a bunch of different hardware configs...