Steam, what are you doing on my machine? I have one chat window open, nothing else, there are NO messages going back and forth and yet my system stats show something like this (10 second integration):

    PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU  %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND                                                                                                                                            
1578766 ronny     20   0 4857032 330216 165264 S  38.5   1.6   4:23.91 steamwebhelper                                                                                                                                     
1578554 ronny     20   0  592368 132636  82224 S  18.3   0.7   2:16.90 steamwebhelper                                                                                                                                     
1578596 ronny     20   0 9196408 420472 108172 S  13.2   2.1   1:48.26 steamwebhelper    

The processes with the highest CPU load are steam, using 75% of one of my cores. For nothing. What is going on in the background?

I guess here we see the externalisation of developer costs. Instead of it decreasing Steam’s revenue for employing someone who implements the better solutions, every user is paying the costs in their electricity bill. For one user it’s only a few Watts, but 60 Million people use Steam on a daily basis. Even if everyone has Steam open for just an hour, we are talking about hundreds of Megawatthours per day, or tens of GWh a year. This is the equivalent to what over 10,000 households use a year.

Writing this down is a nice reminder for myself to try not to implement the lazy solution, but invest the extra brain work to create something I can be more proud.

While I wrote this text, the steamwebhelper processes accumulated 23 minutes CPU time (in 33 minutes runtime)