Hearing some fan noise, I immediately checked htop to see if any process is hogging the CPU. Nothing looked alarming, but turning off GDrive lowered CPU usage. I am not sure what the root cause is.
Chrome 1.0 on Windows had a similar annoyance - it was pretty fast for a 1.0 browser, but was absolutely not a refined product, using amazing amounts of memory and spiking my processor way too often.
Typically around 1.6% on my 2.66 GHz Core i7 MBP.
Definitely annoying, and makes our Macbook Air toting staff much less interested.
That's nothing. I wouldn't worry about an app that uses 2.2% of one core while it's idle. It's no big deal.
This 'app' is technically more of a background process. 2.2% for a background process is a lot. Considering the fact that there may be up to 100 background processes, if they were all running at 2.2%, that wouldn't leave much CPU for anything else. Furthermore, this application is not doing any heavy number crunching, which begs the question, why is it using 2.2% of a CPU? The average CPU load on my MBP is 1.1%. We are talking about bumping that to 3.3% to do virtually nothing, and I'm already running dropbox. 2.2% seems like a lot.