This is bit different post. It’s a story.

Let’s start from the beginning. I noticed that my laptop fan starter running more and more. It ran day and night. Yes, I’m one of those not closing their computers at night or when not using it. But this was unusual, usually when idle it’s quiet and in low power mode. But lately it was just spinning, and it was kind of disturbing.

CPU usage

My first clue was CPU usage. For some reason my browser was using constantly 30-40% the CPU. Closing the browser made the problem go away. When I launched it again, it sometimes jumped to the 30-40% range again, but most of the time it was acting normally.

I was unable to find out why. So I let it be.

Annoyance

With time it started to really annoy me. So I started to monitor with htop, when in it was high and when idle.

Soon I started notice the pattern. It was high only when I was using Mattermost. But that had never happened before, why now?

I quickly checked but did not notice anything suspicious. So I stated the question out loud. And there was the answer. Animations! There was even other people experiencing the same.

But my problem was there were no animations visible…

The Solution

Except! Earlier this year Mattermost introduced Custom status, and there was just some time ago a upgrade to version supporting those. I started checking people statuses.

And there it was. One contact had Polar bear walking. That innocent GIF just used over 30% my CPU when it was visible. In case the contact was not visible, or I had another tab open in my browser there was no issues. But in case I left his contact info visible, the the issue remained.

After figuring out the problem, solution was just simple. Avoid leaving the contact visible. And maybe to inform about that matter, since I bet I’m not the only one experiencing this issue.

It’s kind of ironic that polar bear causes excessive usage of electricity, possibly melting down ice, and destroying the habitat of the real polar bears.

So I made a donation to WWF to help polar bears, and hopefully that helps even a bit…