What to Do About Web Helper Performance Issues?

[The Nintendo Patent Lawsuit Fest]

Sometimes, and I don't know why, the Steam Web Helper processes can spike and really hog the system resources, which is obviously not great for playing games.

This is particularly a problem in Team Fortress 2 and "Messages of the Day", which are a welcome screen on community servers. These use the Steam Web Helper processes to display websites, which for some reason a lot of the time causes performance problems. The kicker is, even after leaving the server the processes will not calm down and TF2 will stutter until you restart it, or use Process Explorer to suspend the main Web Helper process and kill the child processes. This ensures a stutter free experience.

But I don't want to do this every time I play TF2 or other games that suffer from the Web Helper. In the past, it used to be possible to launch Steam with the -no-browser argument, but they disabled this with the Steam Deck UI updates. So now my only option is to kill the Web Helper processes, seemingly.

If there's any other solution, please let me know, thank you

Otherwise, Valve, please fix this, this has been a problem for so many years already

[sdfdafadsf]

i use an autohotkey script

Process, Priority, hl2.exe, High
Loop
{
Run,%ComSpec% /c Taskkill -f -im steamwebhelper.exe,%A_ScriptDir%,Hide
sleep, 60000
}

[The Nintendo Patent Lawsuit Fest]

Oh, that's neat. I'll be giving this a go. Thank you very much

[Steven Seagull]

Steam will restart the webhelpers when you kill them, that can have an even worse performance impact.
You can set the webhelper priority to lowest (idle). You don't need to install autohotkey, plain Windows bat file works:

Create a .bat file in your startup folder and copy the below:

echo off
:start
wmic process where name="steamwebhelper.exe" call setpriority "idle"
wmic process where name="hl2.exe" call setpriority "high priority"
timeout /T 5 /NOBREAK
goto start

Your startup folder is here:

%appdata%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup

[Watermelon {JESUS IS LORD}]

i restart pc and steam stops hogging ram, steam should only use about 200-800 MBs tops anymore then that i restart pc and its back to normal

[76561199019888420]

like

[The Nintendo Patent Lawsuit Fest]

Originally posted by Steven Seagull:

Steam will restart the webhelpers when you kill them, that can have an even worse performance impact.

It was late so I didn't take an exact look at the script; I assumed it would suspend the main process and kill the child processes because that's the only thing that helps, basically

Originally posted by Steven Seagull:

You can set the webhelper priority to lowest (idle). You don't need to install autohotkey, plain Windows bat file works:

Create a .bat file in your startup folder and copy the below:

echo off
:start
wmic process where name="steamwebhelper.exe" call setpriority "idle"
wmic process where name="hl2.exe" call setpriority "high priority"
timeout /T 5 /NOBREAK
goto start

Your startup folder is here:

%appdata%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup

Doesn't seem like a great solution either because this script itself appears to be quite performance intensive for some reason, every time it does its thing the CPU spikes

So I guess it's back to manually suspending and killing web helper processes...

[Steven Seagull]

Originally posted by Thornskade:

Originally posted by Steven Seagull:

Steam will restart the webhelpers when you kill them, that can have an even worse performance impact.

It was late so I didn't take an exact look at the script; I assumed it would suspend the main process and kill the child processes because that's the only thing that helps, basically

Originally posted by Steven Seagull:

You can set the webhelper priority to lowest (idle). You don't need to install autohotkey, plain Windows bat file works:

Create a .bat file in your startup folder and copy the below:

echo off
:start
wmic process where name="steamwebhelper.exe" call setpriority "idle"
wmic process where name="hl2.exe" call setpriority "high priority"
timeout /T 5 /NOBREAK
goto start

Your startup folder is here:

%appdata%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup

Doesn't seem like a great solution either because this script itself appears to be quite performance intensive for some reason, every time it does its thing the CPU spikes

So I guess it's back to manually suspending and killing web helper processes...

Yes. You might change 5 to 60 so it would run only once per minute. Hopefully Steam won't respawn new webhelper processes that often.

[The Nintendo Patent Lawsuit Fest]

Frankly I think I'm still better off manually suspending rather than accepting permanent performance hitches on my system but thanks anyway

[Steven Seagull]

Originally posted by Thornskade:

Frankly I think I'm still better off manually suspending rather than accepting permanent performance hitches on my system but thanks anyway

What you mean by manually suspend?

[Richard Dastardly]

If you don't mind managing the system from the mobile client you can just block execution of steamwebhelper entirely ( various ways, windows has one built in ). You'll have no access to anything bar the game list - so basically small mode - but given you can get to the store via website & update games from mobile client, you don't really need it. Might break the friends list but most people I know have abandoned that already.

[The Nintendo Patent Lawsuit Fest]

Originally posted by Steven Seagull:

Originally posted by Thornskade:

Frankly I think I'm still better off manually suspending rather than accepting permanent performance hitches on my system but thanks anyway

What you mean by manually suspend?

What I said in the thread post. Open Process Explorer and suspend the web helper process. Basically what the script does, but manually when I launch the game so the CPU isn't forcibly spiked all the time

Originally posted by Richard Dastardly:

If you don't mind managing the system from the mobile client you can just block execution of steamwebhelper entirely ( various ways, windows has one built in ). You'll have no access to anything bar the game list - so basically small mode - but given you can get to the store via website & update games from mobile client, you don't really need it. Might break the friends list but most people I know have abandoned that already.

Yeah some functionality is locked behind web helpers now sadly, even adding launch arguments or adding non-Steam games. I wish this were still an option

[Start_Running]

Originally posted by Thornskade:

Sometimes, and I don't know why, the Steam Web Helper processes can spike and really hog the system resources, which is obviously not great for playing games.

And this is happening *during* game play when you have the game up and full screen without the overlay up?

[Steven Seagull]

Originally posted by Thornskade:

Originally posted by Steven Seagull:

What you mean by manually suspend?

What I said in the thread post. Open Process Explorer and suspend the web helper process. Basically what the script does, but manually when I launch the game so the CPU isn't forcibly spiked all the time

Oh, OK. Yes, this is a much better solution.

[The Nintendo Patent Lawsuit Fest]

Originally posted by Start_Running:

Originally posted by Thornskade:

Sometimes, and I don't know why, the Steam Web Helper processes can spike and really hog the system resources, which is obviously not great for playing games.

And this is happening *during* game play when you have the game up and full screen without the overlay up?

Yeah. As I explained, I know exactly how it happens in TF2 as it's caused by Welcome Messages/Pages on community servers, which make use of the Steam Web Browser. But I've seen it happen in other random games as well without figuring out the cause, thankfully that's not too common. But TF2 is the game I play the most so I'm highly affected by this problem