A simple GtkSpinner is very costly in CPU cycles

[Kian Karas <kian karas dev gmail com>]

Hi smart people

I just introduced animation, in the form of a GtkSpinner, to my application
for the first time. When the spinner is animating, the application takes up
45 % of the CPU resources (the application is otherwise idle at 0-2,6 %).
The CPU is a single core ARM Cortex-A7 running at 528 MHz (maximum).

This seems like a lot of MIPS for rotating an image of approximately 20x20
px.

Could it be caused by a simple misconfiguration?

Any suggestions on how I can reduce the load without disabling animation
completely?

Is it possible to slow down the frame rate of animations some how?

Thanks!
Kian