Evolution spinners induce high CPU in Cinnamon

[John Franklin]

System: Linux Mint 17 Cinnamon (x86_64)
Hardware: AMD A6 4400M with integrated Radeon 7520G 8GB DDR3-1600 (512M shared graphics memory)

One of my accounts in Evolution has a self-signed SSL cert. When Evolution starts up, it pops up a "Certificate trust..." dialog, effectively pausing any activity in Evolution. In the main Evolution window, a spinner is visible in the status bar with the text "Scanning folders in IMAP server ...".

If I run "top" on this machine while the spinner is visible, I observe Cinnamon consuming 20% to 35% of a CPU and X consumes an additional 10% to 15%.

If I minimize the main Evolution window, Cinnamon drops to 1% to 3% and X stays below 5%.

Restore Evolution, CPU consumption returns to the previously observed high levels.

After I accept the cert and the spinners go away, Cinnamon and X consume low amounts of CPU again, even with Evolution visible.

Using Gnome Power Statistics to measure wattage, I'm also observing a 33% increase in power consumption, 12W vs 9W. May not sound like much, but on a 48Wh battery, 3W for a spinner is a big deal.

[John Franklin (ubuntu-sentaidigital)]

Running fglrx, of course.

[John Franklin (ubuntu-sentaidigital)]

Is it possible to offload animations like this to the GPU? Would such offloading show up as load on an APU?

[John Franklin (ubuntu-sentaidigital)]

This is also observed on a MacBookPro9,2 with an Intel Core i5 3210M and HD 4000 graphics.