Steam using a lot of memory

[Crusader01]

Hi. I want to optimise Steam to use as little memory as possible, because I am trying to run highly intensive games on 4gb RAM. As you can see in the attached image, the memory usage is quite high... And makes a lot of difference when running something like War Thunder or Fallout 4. How can I optimise Steam? Why is it so intensive? All it is, is a game launcher, not a missile launcher!

[img]https://i.gyazo.com/e90bc9a02592fbe0f583ba00c50f36be.png[/img]

124.9MB (approx.) of memory is being used. I can understand it with the Overlay, which by the way 1. I tried disabling, nothing much happened... and 2. I desperately want to keep it because it's the best thing in gaming since the invention of Google.

Thank you and Merry Christmas/Happy New Year!

[Raiden]

I don't think you can tweak it

Maybe you can try closing apps you don't use and disable some unimportant windows services, but then again the impact might be too little to notice.

May I ask why you're having only 4gb of RAM when you have a build good enough to run Fallout 4? 4gb is barely sufficient these days, especially with windows 10 taking up most of it.

[Crusader01]

Originally posted by Shoukaku:

I don't think you can tweak it :vanilla:

Maybe you can try closing apps you don't use and disable some unimportant windows services, but then again the impact might be too little to notice.

May I ask why you're having only 4gb of RAM when you have a build good enough to run Fallout 4? 4gb is barely sufficient these days, especially with windows 10 taking up most of it.

I already disabled almost all services I don't need, I turned a lot of Windows (8.1) features off (such as animations), and I edited the registry, all according to a guide I read online. It helped a bit with general performance, but I can't say I notice the improvement in gaming, because I almost always shut down Explorer before launching an intensive game.

Fallout 4 is running medium graphics and extremely tweaked .ini files... In fact I downloaded three different overhauls, worked out which worked best, and edited them myself to my liking. It helps a lot, except in Boston (I don't know if you've played it... Boston is an extreme lag zone for most gamers, whether they have pc's or potatoes). I have a potato laptop, so I'd say my good ol' Asus is trying its hardest!

I know 4gb is barely sufficient, in fact most modern "pretty" games like WT and FO4 are very much on the limit, even after .ini configuration. I'm so desperate to get a decent laptop... I don't mind graphics. I just want a game to run at over 30FPS.

Anyway I will keep searching for steam configuration files, and see if I can tweak those... because 124MB is just unreal....

Thanks a lot for your reply!

[Crusader01]

Aha, that explains a lot! Cheers.

Also, I never said anything about "system dying". I simply said that it would be nice to have 150MB allocated to a game, not to Steam idling in the background doing nothing. True, it has the fancy friend system and the overlay, but 150MB...? It's not rendering any pictures... Media player uses less than that aha!

Originally posted by Satoru:

<link to here>
Also if 100MB of RAM usage is causing your system to die, steam isn't the issue.

[Satoru]

Steam is an application on top of a chromium browser. As such its never going to get to the point where it takes up 10MB of RAM. Note the 'features' in the client are not correlative to memory usage. People often complain that 'remove feature x' when that has almost no relevance to memory usage in the client, when 90% of it is "chromium rendering the store page".

Again the OS knows how to allocate memory. Aka steam says "I would like some memory" and the OS goes "ok well i have x amoutn free so here's y for now, ask if you need mroe" If you actually start running out, the OS will start clawing back memory from other programs and allocating it to the game .

[Crusader01]

Originally posted by Satoru:

Steam is an application on top of a chromium browser. As such its never going to get to the point where it takes up 10MB of RAM. Note the 'features' in the client are not correlative to memory usage. People often complain that 'remove feature x' when that has almost no relevance to memory usage in the client, when 90% of it is "chromium rendering the store page".

Again the OS knows how to allocate memory. Aka steam says "I would like some memory" and the OS goes "ok well i have x amoutn free so here's y for now, ask if you need mroe" If you actually start running out, the OS will start clawing back memory from other programs and allocating it to the game .

That is what I wanted to hear. So It doesn't sap the resources. The game gets it, especially if it is high priority... and that's really good for me. Thanks a lot!

[Satoru]

Originally posted by Crusader01:

Originally posted by Satoru:

Steam is an application on top of a chromium browser. As such its never going to get to the point where it takes up 10MB of RAM. Note the 'features' in the client are not correlative to memory usage. People often complain that 'remove feature x' when that has almost no relevance to memory usage in the client, when 90% of it is "chromium rendering the store page".

Again the OS knows how to allocate memory. Aka steam says "I would like some memory" and the OS goes "ok well i have x amoutn free so here's y for now, ask if you need mroe" If you actually start running out, the OS will start clawing back memory from other programs and allocating it to the game .

That is what I wanted to hear. So It doesn't sap the resources. The game gets it, especially if it is high priority... and that's really good for me. Thanks a lot!

Yeah we're not really in the XP days where you'd be manually trying to make the memory allocation do what you want.

As long as you're running basically anything Win7 and above, just trust the OS to do its job. It knows whats running and how to allocate it. And does its best to move memory alllcation around to make sure your system is ok.

Of course if you've got 4GB of RAM and you're running Chrome with 100 tabs open, then try to run Skyrim with 50 mods, you're probably going to have issues.