Why is ekeyd consuming so much power?

[Jan-Piet Mens]

This is going to sound silly, but ekeyd consumes about 6W of power :)

I have an Entropy Key connected to an idle HP MiniServer which, out of
curiousity, I plugged into a Watt meter to check how much power the
machine consumes.

After powering up the server, I notice the machine consumes about 28.5W,
but when launching `ekeyd', consumption rises to 34.6W, a difference of
just over 6W.

(An endless loop in the shell [ while true; do : ; done ] also produces
an additional 6W.)

I note that `strace' on a running ekeyd shows a (very?) large number of
system calls:

        read(6, "* E!43oCQfXPyP+r0Vr2JBYu5qdxdD/a"..., 64) = 64
        poll([{fd=3, events=POLLIN}, {fd=5, events=POLLIN}, {fd=6,
                events=POLLIN}], 3, -1) = 1 ([{fd=6, revents=POLLIN}])

with the following totals in about 10 seconds:

% time     seconds  usecs/call     calls    errors syscall
------ ----------- ----------- --------- --------- ----------------
 89.97    0.001866           5       389           poll
 10.03    0.000208           1       390           read
  0.00    0.000000           0         1           brk
  0.00    0.000000           0         1           restart_syscall
------ ----------- ----------- --------- --------- ----------------
100.00    0.002074                   781           total

Is that a normal operation?

        -JP