Process "Steam Client WebHelper" hogging CPU

[McChicken]

Occasionally during games this process "Steam Client WebHelper" will start using lots of CPU and memory and causing my game to lag. I've caught it spiking at up to 70% of my CPU usage in the past. Today it was around 30% and using over 2GB of memory while I was playing TF2. I think I've mostly had this issue while playing TF2, but TF2 is the game I play the most so it could just be a coincidence.

I've seen other people having this problem but I couldn't find a definite solution. How can I fix this, if possible?

[Mad Scientist]

Sounds like a lower end CPU to me, what are you using for your CPU?

[McChicken]

Originally posted by Orion:

Sounds like a lower end CPU to me, what are you using for your CPU?

AMD Ryzen 2200G. My games are running just fine except for when this process starts using up resources.

[Admiral Genocyde]

Originally posted by Mr. Gentlebot:

Sounds like a lower end CPU to me, what are you using for your CPU?

Why would his cpu suddenly cause Steam to use up 2gb of RAM? Sounds like a memory leak.

Originally posted by Orangey:

I've seen other people having this problem but I couldn't find a definite solution. How can I fix this, if possible?

I've noticed this happen a lot while in the points shop and while having the friends list open. It seems to be caused by the animated profile features. While browsing around for a while people were saying turning off the GPU accelerated rendering tends to fix this problem. It's in your settings under interface.

[Oast]

Thanks Admiral, this was the problem for me. The animated frames in particular seem to cause the high CPU usage, but disabling GPU accelerated web rendering fixed it.

[Quint the Alligator Snapper]

I remember seeing memory usage spike even when doing stuff like scrolling through my library (which would load tons of images, of course). Not quite that much, but it was noticeable, as I watched Task Manager while using Steam.

For what it's worth, if steamwebhelper processes get too annoying, you can launch the whole client with the -no-browser parameter, which causes none of them to spawn and also disables browser-rendered features. You can still access your library via Small Mode, though you'll need to use Big Picture Mode or maybe Steam console to uninstall games.

[RiO]

Originally posted by Quint the Alligator Snapper:

you'll need to use Big Picture Mode or maybe Steam console to uninstall games.

It looks like the 'Properties' window for individual titles has also been moved over to web-rendered content in one of the recent client updates. So might not be only the uninstall functionality that's affected now, but also stuff like enabling/disabling individual purchased DLC; verification of installed files; etc.

[Quint the Alligator Snapper]

Originally posted by RiO:

Originally posted by Quint the Alligator Snapper:

you'll need to use Big Picture Mode or maybe Steam console to uninstall games.

It looks like the 'Properties' window for individual titles has also been moved over to web-rendered content in one of the recent client updates. So might not be only the uninstall functionality that's affected now, but also stuff like enabling/disabling individual purchased DLC; verification of installed files; etc.

Ohh, it's gotten worse? Sheesh.

[wonder]

I have the same problem. My game uses around 10% CPU and Steam Web Helper around 15%.

Im not even doing anything in Steam, its just minimized in the background while im playing, but it still needs more resources than the game.

EDIT: Steam Web Helper also uses 1,2 GB of RAM.
WTF is this program/task doing?

[wonder]

I found a solution: Go to library and right click on the game you are playing, click properties and uncheck "Enable Steam Overlay while in-game".

Steam Web Helper CPU usage went from a constant ~15% to 0.


-15% CPU usage ... That is the biggest performance upgrade i have gotten on my PC in years.

[eetu]

I have the same problem, but i would like to keep using steam friends and the overlay since i use it a lot while gaming too.
If anyone finds the solution for this it would greatly be appreciated, i will let you guys know if i find out a solution.
So far i have been unable to find one, that does not involve disabling friends list in some way.
So with my i5-6600k and 16gigs of ram the steam webhelper will take anywhere between 10-30% at most times from my cpu, and up to 2gigs+ of RAM.
Only thing i'm doing is to let steam run on the background, not actually doing anything, other than having friends list open.
It takes awhile for it to take up so much ram, but eventually it will it seems.
Man would be nice to figure out what the hell is wrong.
I did try to disable GPU accelerated rendering, but it didnt do anything for me sadly.

[Yumi]

Umm.. i have the exact same problem than you guys but even launching a game causes this process to hog 100% of my cpu being an I5 9600K
currently testing the "disable steam overlay" solution, the issue was most present in Warframe

Edit 1 : disabling steam overlay didn't really do much, just sitting in the ship in warframe causes the same process to hog 4.6K MB of my memory sometimes deciding to spike from 0 to 60% CPU usage causing my system to freeze for a few seconds in game.

I would really appreciate some help on this, or possibly letting steam know of this issue.

Edit 2 : Disabling steam overlay in all games + these options seems to have fixed my issue at least for steam client webhelper :

Steam => Settings => In-Game => Disable steam overlay
Under "In-Game" should be "Interface"

=> Disable the following options :

-Smooth scrolling in web views
-GPU accelerated rendering in web views
-hardware video decoding

i hope this helps, pretty much the biggest option is GPU accelerated recording.

[CLUTCH]

+1 Steam Client WebHelper taking up 1.8 gigs of memory and slowing down games.

[riddLedSKL]

steam client webhelper using 2.5gb ram as well...

[eetu]

I found out that "Enable Animated Avatars & Animated Avatar Frames in your Friends List and Chat" -option turned OFF, helped with most of it, i'm not sure if its completely fixed now, but try that out people, maybe it will work for you too.
It is in the friend list options.

[Junior2k]

Mine started doing this today, I was playing Black ops in Battlenet and everything started lagging. I normally get a solid 60fps then it started dropping to 45-48fps. Looked in task manager and Steam Web Client was using 40% CPU I didn't even have steam open or in use it had just booted with the machine and was down by the clock. I have a Ryzen 5 3600 and 32GB ram and it was absorbing the ram. I just killed steam and the PC was fine went back to normal but obviously it's doing something, it wasn't downloading or updating any games - really strange.