Why does steam always take a long time to launch the first game of the day?

[B〄F Altonator]

No matter what game it is, when i first turn my pc on, boot up steam, then launch a game....
It always takes like 10 minutes to actually launch.
Any other game after this boots up in seconds.

My friend has the same and we have no clue what's causing it.

[nullable]

Well since you didn't provide any details about your system I'm free to assume you're just running crummy/aging PC's with HDDs as the primary storage.

A faster system will get better performance.

[B〄F Altonator]

Originally posted by Brockenstein:

Well since you didn't provide any details about your system I'm free to assume you're just running crummy/aging PC's with HDDs as the primary storage.

A faster system will get better performance.

Nope we both have fairly decent rigs but yes i do use a hard drive for primary storage and not a ssd. Not sure if my friend uses a ssd or not.

I assume this isn’t a problem for you? Does your first game always launch normally? Does it take any longer than when you launch a 2nd game?

[cSg|mc-Hotsauce]

When was the last time you used the Windows restart function?

[B〄F Altonator]

Originally posted by cSg|mc-Hotsauce:

When was the last time you used the Windows restart function?

:qr:

Like, a normal restart? Fairly recently.

[zuppaclub]

yeah, since steam beta / new layout, steam does take a couple of minutes to launch a game, it's like sync the cloud or something even though I already disable the cloud saving in the option

after playing 1 game and playing another game , it open the game instantly.

[Reggaejunkiedrew]

Even just a small ssd just for the OS is well worth the investment. The improvement in certain games is nice but it was the OS boot speed that blew my mind when I first switched. Everything is fully booted in < a minute.

[Muppet among Puppets]

What is your antivirus?
But anyway, its likely that one.

[Muppet among Puppets]

Originally posted by Reggaejunkiedrew:

Even just a small ssd just for the OS is well worth the investment. The improvement in certain games is nice but it was the OS boot speed that blew my mind when I first switched. Everything is fully booted in < a minute.

You dont need a ssd to have steam start a game at once.

The fast boot time in default win 10 comes from a "feature" that writes the ram on disk at shutdown.
Disable that, its nonsense.

The start of windows with ssd is quicker. But there end the obvious relevant time differences until you load other things. And then it would be around 3 times faster, at most if at all.

[刀持ち]

it should never take that long, your kit could be the issue, also bloatware slowing down you system could also be part of the problem, my gut feeling from what you said is partly hardware and software, the suggestions here are spot on. secondly a fresh reinstall wont go amiss, when a system is bogged down like what your describing. starting from scratch usually fixes things faster than spending hours upon hours searching for a obscure policy setting or crap ware dll..

tip... once i have setup a system with a fresh os and drivers , I always ensure I do a full system partition backup in case of the situation your in, that is before i start adding anything games, apps, hent.....(never mind that ) or utils , that way i will always have that fall back position.open to me.

[Crazy Tiger]

Originally posted by Muppet among Puppets:

What is your antivirus?
But anyway, its likely that one.

Aye, something like that. Or at least a program interfering.

[nullable]

Originally posted by B〄F Altonator:

Originally posted by Brockenstein:

Well since you didn't provide any details about your system I'm free to assume you're just running crummy/aging PC's with HDDs as the primary storage.

A faster system will get better performance.

Nope we both have fairly decent rigs but yes i do use a hard drive for primary storage and not a ssd. Not sure if my friend uses a ssd or not.

I assume this isn’t a problem for you? Does your first game always launch normally? Does it take any longer than when you launch a 2nd game?

I don't have any issues.

i7 8700k, GeForce 2080 Super, 16GB 3200mhz DDR4, 2.5TB of NVMe SSD, 3TB of SATA SSD. Everything loads up pretty quick regardless of when or how.

I'd bet a dollar if your friend is experiencing something very similar he's running an HDD as a primary drive too. It's still fairly common to be using HDDs as primary storage. I mean HDDs are functional, but they're not high performance. And they have limited IO resources, and if you've just restarted there's still work going on the background dependent on disk access for minutes that's going to have an impact on performance and user experience. And your complaint ultimately circles back to disk performance by the sounds of it. By the time you reboot, load the first game and then load the second game sufficient time has passed for most/all the work causing the issue to finish up. With more disk resources free the second load is bound to be faster.

If you want to improve disk performance a SSD would likely resolve your problem, even a cheap SSD is bound to be 5-10 times faster in real world performance than the best HDD. And your particular scenario is one of the use cases where a SSD would really shine.

People don't think disk performance matters and they don't care, until they find out it does matter and they do care. And it sounds like you've just reached that point but haven't quite come to the conclusion disk performance is the issue. And maybe disabling your AV or stripping everything down will help your performance. But ultimately that still just proves disk performance is the issue. I don't have to worry about it because of SSDs. When I was running a HDDs primarily it was more of a concern and I was just used to the crummy performance.

[Realigo Actual]

turn off antivirus, try now

[B〄F Altonator]

Some additional notes:
People seem to think it’s an issue with pc performance. However only steam does this. If i launch a game that isn’t on the steam platform it loads up in the same time regardless.
And yes i have tried with and without antivirus on.

[Muppet among Puppets]

If it is only first start, it certainly is not ssd or hdd question.

But for this test, wait a bit before trying first, just in case.

1) It did a difference?

No?
Then
2) Make sure you only have one antivirus.
Make exceptions for the steam folder in your antivirus. Tell us what happened.

[B〄F Altonator]

Originally posted by Muppet among Puppets:

wait a bit before trying first

I have. In fact one time i was just watching youtube on my pc, decided to boot up a game and it still took a long time to launch. Was the first game i opened that day. Steam is already allowed through my firewall.