this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2025
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Linux Gaming
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Oh yeah. If you leave a steam page open, it'll create a very slow memory leak. Left store page open for about a week, came back to 6gb steamwebhelper xd
Wait really?! Feel like that's a bug that really needs addressing
what kind of sane person is gonna leave a steam page open for over a week, though?
I can see it easily being accidentally left open if you have a busy desktop and don't regularly restart your PC
In my case, i use multiple workspaces. Had a workspace for gaming set up and left the window on the store page. Had a busy week so I didn't game. I usually don't turn off my computer because I contribute to Folding@Home at night. Week flies by and I start to wonder why my ram is full and investigate :D
I mean.. I often open steam for something and then kind of forget about it.
What kind of sane person is gonna debug and track down a memory leak, though? Just buy more ram
What kind of sane person is going to buy more RAM? Just download it
Just mount your swap partition on google drive. xd
people who like having money?????
memory leak's at a rate that doesn't matter (~30mb/hour). That makes it hard to track down & reproduce. Also, solution would be to just navigate to your steam library or just not leave the window open like that :p
no it doesnt?
It's a web browser, it's only going to come from one place lmao.
The Web.
yeah, and the answer is electron, it's electron causing the memory leak, the solution is to not use it.
I completely forgot Steam used electron.
i haven't because it's been a completely unusable buggy mess ever since i've installed it, and it transitioned to electron, routinely uses 1gb of ram, 2gb on bad days. That's 2 whole USD wasted, and that's the price of CHEAP ram.
Graphics just don't work, that might be an nvidia problem to be fair, menus are broken, buttons haven't worked, refactoring the UI seems to make it slower. Scrolling a literal single web page is practically unusable due to lag and stuttering. If you use proton, and auto shader compilation, it's useless because you can't even configure how you want it to be run. Don't want to compile 12gb of shaders for a game that's 200GB? That you play 2 times a year? Get fucked.
You can skip shader compilation. Also, it sounds like a driver issue. Electron has gpu suppport by default so it shouldn't be laggy.
on a per game basis? Last i checked you could only enable it for all games, or no games. I don't want to manually skip compilations, i want to select a list of games that automatically compile shaders, i don't want beamng to compile 70gb of shaders because it got an update this week, unless i'm going to play it, but something i play more frequently like factorio, i would like for that to be a regular function.
I'm fairly sure it's driver related, but steam is built on electron, and chrome/firefox work perfectly fine, and so does discord electron, so my only guess is that nvidia driver gaming is happening. Or steam has the single most incompetent installation of electron across any software i use.
I have no idea why only steam would be affected. That just doesn't make any sense.
doesn't seem to matter whether it's enabled or not, it performs like shit, idk why. Again, firefox and chrome are fine, discord is fine (it still runs like shit, but it's discord, that's normal)
That honestly sounds like a good feature to request imo.
Are you on the steam beta? I've generally had a better experience there.
You could also try the low performance setting in steam. (steam settings > library > low performance mode)
it would be a great feature, and considering i own like 10 games, and there are people out there who own like, 200, i'm honestly shocked this wasn't immediately included? I feel like this is such an obvious thing. i would be surprised if somebody hasn't already requested it.
no, i'm on stable, because i like my software to work, though maybe i should fuck around with my steam install sometime.
i could, but im running a 1070 and a 5900x, im pretty sure it's not a hardware limitation. But i might mess with that later.
Good luck brother :D
hopefully it improves. I'm honestly waiting for heroic to implement steam, or a decent CLI implementation to come about, SteamCMD does exist, but it's meant for server hosting, theoretically you could use it for client use, but i don't think it recommends you do that, for several reasons.