Currently, it appears to be checking every 30 seconds... this seems to me to be way too often. It would be nice if: a) the default was longer b) it was tunable
there are different things going on. the applet polls the model evern 10 seconds now (though it no longer changes the icon). this poll is almost always a noop though -- it chgecks mtime on /var/lib/rpm/Packages, then checks to see if it's time to do RPC again. the time for next RPC is actually sent down from our servers in RWC, specifically not a user tunable parameter, so that we can better control load. none of those numbers really should be user-tunable though.
Right now it appears to consume a fair amout of CPU cycles doing this checking. Also, much of the time it is displaying a "?" on grey instead of a "check" on blue or "!" on red. When I click the "?", a popup message says "Network Error - 12: SSL_connect error" The CPU cycles really need to be cut!
Closing this bug. The original issue is wontfix as described in comment #1, and newer versions of the applet are better about cpu resources. (Memory usage is another matter - see bug #170022.)