This software eats an absurd amount of cpu cycles!!!
I really like speedometer - unfortunately it definitely is not an acceptable tool for measuring a potentially already heavily stressed system, it eats too many cpu cycles! On a decent Linux laptop with a fast Core i7 speedometer is the most cpu intensive process with around 7-10% CPU usage visible in htop - this is insane! Even Chromium browser does not spend so much with many tabs open!
This is by far the most absurd case of a system measurement tool that stresses the system itself that I have ever seen - a good candidate for an "absurd software award" that should exist.
Would you provide some more details? I see about 1% CPU on an i5 laptop running Linux. If I monitor a bunch of interfaces and make the font small and window really large I can get that up to about 6%. While that's not great I don't think would be eligible for any sort of award :-)
If you like speedometer and want to see it perform better, please attach a python profile report from running urwid on your system so we can see what's contributing the most to CPU usage.