Comment 20 for bug 289322

Well, the issue you're describing isn't the same as the original reporter. CPU usage does not influence the timing of display blanking in gnome-power-manager (you can check that for yourself in src/gpm-idle.c). If CPU usage *is* influencing the timing in some way, then that's a bug in some other component rather than gnome-power-manager.

The 1 minute you set corresponds to the time period between the display dimming, and then switching off (blanking). Is that what you are measuring? If not, then I already said that the dimming time is deliberately variable. The idle dim time will double (from the default 10 seconds) each time you cause a keyboard or mouse event within 10 seconds of going idle