After some time, when gnome-panel starts working again, the system calls goes down a bit: 2601 gettimeofday's 0 time(NULL) 1494 read() 761 write() 1973 poll() 0 select() 36 stat64() Hope this statistics helps -- gnome-panel eats 50% cpu for half an hour and flickers https://launchpad.net/bugs/52405