Help steam is eating up my space

[venog89]

I was playing and at some point I had run out of RAM but I didn't have anything open apart from the game and Steam but for some reason Steam was consuming 11GB of RAM, when I finished Steam I got a system message mentioning that I had no space left on the hard drive but I had more than 120GB free or so I remembered when I went to check the disk in fact I had no space I did a scan for viruses, deleted temporary files and in last resort desperation I decided to look for the folder that was taking up so much space and I went one by one on the hard drive and in the end it took me to Steam and these 2 files that I don't know what they do or what they are for

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\logs\cef_log.txt
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\logs\cef_log.previous.txt

Is it okay to delete them?
Would Steam ban me for that?
I'm scared, honestly.

[ShakespearOnIce]

RAM and hard drive space are different things.

RAM is the temporary memory data is loaded into when your computer needs to temporarily store something. This includes things lime images for web pages loaded in your browser and data used by programs you are running.

Your hard drive is your long term storage used by your computer. Examples would be memes you save from Facebook and games you install from Steam, but also temporary internet files (again, such as images) which your computer stores locally in limited capacity so it doesn't have to download them every time you open a particular website.

I did some searches on what the cef_log file is, and it looks like this issue is occuring elsewhere, where not being connected to the internet causes an error, which gets logged, which eventually accumulates into an error log that's multiple gigabytes in size.

If you're using the Linux client, I did find one result (5 years old) explaining the Linux client has a VRAM memory leak, which can be fixed by disabling GPU acceleration in the UI settings. Not sure if that's your issue, or if it's still the case, but hopefully it's at least a start in finding a solution.

I don't *think* there would be any issues with deleting the log files; certainly not that you'd get banned. They're basically error logs for problems that are happening with the Steam client, so the worst that happens is you can't tell what happened before you deleted the log.

[venog89]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย ShakespearOnIce:

RAM and hard drive space are different things.

RAM is the temporary memory data is loaded into when your computer needs to temporarily store something. This includes things lime images for web pages loaded in your browser and data used by programs you are running.

Your hard drive is your long term storage used by your computer. Examples would be memes you save from Facebook and games you install from Steam, but also temporary internet files (again, such as images) which your computer stores locally in limited capacity so it doesn't have to download them every time you open a particular website.

I did some searches on what the cef_log file is, and it looks like this issue is occuring elsewhere, where not being connected to the internet causes an error, which gets logged, which eventually accumulates into an error log that's multiple gigabytes in size.

If you're using the Linux client, I did find one result (5 years old) explaining the Linux client has a VRAM memory leak, which can be fixed by disabling GPU acceleration in the UI settings. Not sure if that's your issue, or if it's still the case, but hopefully it's at least a start in finding a solution.

I don't *think* there would be any issues with deleting the log files; certainly not that you'd get banned. They're basically error logs for problems that are happening with the Steam client, so the worst that happens is you can't tell what happened before you deleted the log.

I know the difference between both components, thank you for your answer, really.
I took a screenshot of this funny event