Technical issue update: Excessive polling and slow responsiveness on Neat Pads after 25.2.0 release
Last updated June 12, 2025
Issue description
During the recent deployment of Neat software release NeatOS 25.2, our engineering team have identified two issues that are affecting the quality and performance of our devices:
- Neat devices are excessively polling the https://ota.neat.no cloud service to check for available updates. This inadvertently caused the devices to make too many write requests to the configuration file, leading to an increased CPU load.
- Secondly, Neat Pads running Microsoft Teams are demonstrating slow responsiveness or black screen when joining meetings or changing settings on the Pad.
What caused these issues?
Excessive polling
During normal operation, a Neat device will reach out to https://ota.neat.no cloud service once every hour to check for available updates. During this process, the device will process the information retrieved from the cloud service (typically a JSON file) and write data to its configuration file.
In 25.2.0 release however, a Neat device could send such requests multiple times in a minute and perform many write operations. This can lead to CPU spikes and high resource usage, particularly during nightly updates. This also increases the polling frequencies to the cloud service and any customers monitoring network traffic in their environment will also notice an increase in HTTPS calls made from Neat devices in their environment.
Slow responsiveness and black screen on Neat Pads running Microsoft Teams
Neat pads running Microsoft Teams are sometimes too slow to respond to user actions, such as joining a call or changing a setting, and in some cases show a black screen. The root cause of this issue is under investigation.
However, we believe the excessive polling indirectly contributes to this problem due to more write operations being performed specifically for Microsoft Teams application. The extra CPU and memory resource consumption may also exacerbate this issue. Our engineering teams are working urgently on this problem.
How to recover from these problems?
Excessive polling
- On Thursday, June 12, we have rolled out a new update for NeatOS (25.3.0) to our Preview Channel. This new software version has a fix for the ‘excessive polling’ issue.
- Please note that Preview updates are for evaluation and are not yet fully supported. We do not recommend installing Preview software on Neat devices used in a production environment. Ideally you should use a Neat device that is in a lab or a lower-risk user environment to try out the Preview software.
Slow responsiveness and black screen on Neat Pads running Microsoft Teams
- Neat engineering team are still investigating this issue and we will update as soon as we have more information.
- For customers affected by the issue, rebooting Neat Pad can temporarily help clear some resources for better performance – but the issue may reappear after continuous use.
- We also believe that the bug-fix for excessive polling will have a positive impact on the overall performance of Neat Pads. To check if the Pad performance improves, we will advise customers to test the latest Preview release on a handful of non-production Neat Pads.
How to get help?
If you’re experiencing this issue or require confirmation that your issue matches this known problem, please reach out to Neat Technical Support team using the contact form here. Please note that your devices must be covered by an active support plan in order for the issue to be verified.