Steam freezing and crashing regularly

[Heroic Ryan]

Recently, for no discernable reason, steam has been freezing and crashing constantly. I'll be on the library page, I go to interact with it, and it's frozen and the page is bright white to indicate its not responding. It never recovers. The only thing to do is use task manager to close steam and then restart it. Has anyone else been getting this problem?

EDIT: In addition to steam crashing, the steam browser frequently breaks.

[Mad Scientist]

That clearly sounds like a system issue that you must troubleshoot accordingly, preferably in the Hardware & OS section.

Either part of your client is broken simply needing a reinstall, disk health is questionable, or a potential memory issue as the top 3 things that could easily cause this, but is not limited to such. Just because something happens with the client, does not mean it's the client. I have hundreds of things in my library with no such issue, additionally the year has really nothing to do with it, we know what the year is by the post date.

[Heroic Ryan]

Originally posted by Mr. Gentlebot:

That clearly sounds like a system issue that you must troubleshoot accordingly, preferably in the Hardware & OS section.

Either part of your client is broken simply needing a reinstall, disk health is questionable, or a potential memory issue as the top 3 things that could easily cause this, but is not limited to such. Just because something happens with the client, does not mean it's the client. I have hundreds of things in my library with no such issue, additionally the year has really nothing to do with it, we know what the year is by the post date.

The vibe that you see me as a dumb-ass aside judging by your comment on the year, I'll look into the memory. I know for an absolute fact it's not the disk. Failing that, I'll look into a client reinstall.

[Mad Scientist]

Originally posted by Heroic Ryan:

The vibe that you see me as a dumb-ass aside judging by your comment on the year, I'll look into the memory. I know for an absolute fact it's not the disk. Failing that, I'll look into a client reinstall.

If that's how you feel that's on you. If you want help from anyone, I strongly advise remaining calm and not responding in an aggressive manner.

[Honey Badger]

Originally posted by Heroic Ryan:

Recently, for no discernable reason, steam has been freezing and crashing constantly. I'll be on the library page, I go to interact with it, and it's frozen and the page is bright white to indicate its not responding. It never recovers. The only thing to do is use task manager to close steam and then restart it. Has anyone else been getting this problem?

EDIT: In addition to steam crashing, the steam browser frequently breaks.

Have you tried anything to fix your issue? It sounds to me like a steam reinstallation might help, but could be anything.

[Carlos100]

Usually sudden "problems" are because something recently changed on your pc.
Steam being at fault ...pretty low as there would be an influx of posts
Check for stuff that you recently did prior to the fault happening.
Did you install anything including updates of any kind etc
Not saying its gonna be easy to find but you need to backtrack to when you first had the problem
I guarantee it will be something stupid

[Heroic Ryan]

After checking a bit, the only new installed programs are some steam games and GOG Galaxy. Don't think any of those would cause the issue but I could be wrong. Also just to be safe ran an anti-virus scan that didn't find anything. Going to mess around with playing some games and try and keep an eye on the memory like Gentlebot suggested.

[Heroic Ryan]

UPDATE: Memory got upwards to about 80% usage. I'm not the smartest when it comes to tech so I'm unsure if this would be enough to cause problems. Additionally, when Steam froze, closing one of steam's backround tasks (In this case, a metro exodus artwork i had opened earlier that for some reason was still running in the backround despite me having long since closed it) caused Steam to unfreeze. That said, it isn't the cause of steam's freezing as that artwork i opened today and this has been happening for multiple days on end, however it is curious that killing that task unfreezed steam. Further testing required, I guess.

[Heroic Ryan]

Update #2: Once again steam froze, memory at 70%. This time, I used task manager to close the friends list, and it unfroze it. Every team steam freezes, it seems to be another part of steam that's the cause of it.

[b0nk]

I have the same issue! It began in January with the Steam client regularly ending up "not responding" after a while, even while playing games. This impacts the game functionality and I end up having to close the game and restart Steam. I have tried full Steam reinstall but it doesn't help and no other applications are having this problem.

I'm gonna try the Steam BETA and see if it helps.

[b0nk]

Originally posted by Heroic Ryan:

Update #2: Once again steam froze, memory at 70%. This time, I used task manager to close the friends list, and it unfroze it. Every team steam freezes, it seems to be another part of steam that's the cause of it.

Hey Ryan. I got a brand new computer after my last post and Steam is still often freezing even while I'm playing games! The Steam web browser also frequently breaks for me as well, in the form of being unable to go to any URL and new tabs being blank/empty!

What are your computer specs?

Previous computer specs:

i7-2600K
32GB RAM
GTX 1080
Samsung 980 SSD
Win10 Pro

Current computer specs:

i9-11900K
32GB RAM
RTX 3080 TI
Samsung 980 Pro SSD
Win 11 Home

[( ( < < <🤖> > > ) )]

both computers should have no proplems with those specs...

there is a hardware and os forum on steam that might be more helpful

are you guys using wifi or hardwired connections...
i'm not very techy but sometimes
wifi drop outs and poor internet
can cause freezing.

have you tried going in offline to see if you get the same problems..

[RiO]

FWIW Steam recently had a memory leak in the Workshop related parts.
The client would keep accruing memory. For some users (probably those with less RAM available in their systems?) it would also quickly result in Steam just crashing and closing.

The cause was apparently some code which was a left-over from facilitating some penetration-testing done via a test-build, which accidentally made it into the production-build of the client.

Maybe the problem a few users here are experiencing is similar to that - i.e. there's some more left-overs hanging around in other features of the client and we just haven't homed in on where; meaning we don't know what the exact trigger is.

[luckykukinha]

Ok, glad I'm not the only one. It's ridiculous! I have to enter steam and RUN to open a game before the client freezes. I've already reinstalled it, checked my ram, did everything, it freezes 10 seconds after opening it. And it started this year too. Specifically after Lost Ark was released.

[Heroic Ryan]

I've noticed by killing certain faucets of Steam in task manager, I can reverse the freeze.

[Mlyrin]

steam doesn't freeze for me but the steam client does bloat its memory usage and eventually crashes (memory leak). Ive noticed that steam matches the memory usage of a game I'm running­. I've also noticed that I'd go afk a while or run a game outside of steam and when I'd come back to steam it would be shut down despite never having rebooting my pc or closing it on my own. Frankly i'm getting quite annoyed at this since I just lost 3 hours of progress in a game.

wasn't doing this in december. I started noticing this in late january.