How To Disable Steam Running In Background When Playing?

[iWhiteout]

Since my system is getting pretty old and I'm slowly in the process of saving enough money to build a new PC, I have to deal with some performance issues in games, but obviously I do everything I can to make sure all my settings for Windows, NVIDIA CP, etc. are optimized to keep game performance as smooth as I can. Unfortunately I dont have the ability to run more than the game itself and maybe one or two apps like discord at once without seeing stuttering or frame drops in-game.

Whenever I run games through steam, im forced to have to run steam in the background, and if i close steam, i get booted off whatever game im on (yes i realize that might seem self-explanatory). When my friend and I play Apex tho, again i have to leave steam open in back, but for some reason my friend is able to run apex without steam running in back, even tho he has Apex downloaded through Steam too. In my case tho, it causes minor stuttering because when i look in 'Details' tab in Task Manager, i see like 5 to 7 different instances for steam or things related to steam and the total memory usage of all of them combined is roughly as much as the game itself. Anybody know why A) my friend can run apex without steam open in background but i can not, and how i can close it, and B) why does it show so many instances for steam/steam related things in TM despite clearly only 1 tab/instance actually running (same thing happens with discord, will open discord once like normal, yet in TM theres multiple lines that say 'Discord.exe')?

[Oh The Folly]

TM shows several instances because that's how Steam is designed. Many browsers will show several instances when they're running too. It's just how some programs are made to work and is normal.

Have you tried creating a desktop shortcut for Apex (right click game in Steam client - Manage - add desktop shortcut) and running the game through that (with Steam closed)?

Doing that should run any game with the minimum amount of resources necessary. I don't know how much less it would be but it would definitely be worth a try.

[Lil C]-[ew C]-[ew is ☂д☂]

Or kill the main Steamwebhelper.exe process is consuming most of cpu and memory. You will be propmpt back to offline status for a brief moment. Since -vgui trick have been nerfed down, discovering by tonight this change. I ran onto multiple occasions when memory RAM and cpu usage were really high and by deleting the right webhelper process I've manage to restore some balance.

But this way is just temporary since, by the time you start using screenshot manager or opening multiple window tabs, memory usage went up again.
And I've been using many library settings like low-bandwitch, low perfomance and etc to minimize what ever voodoo crap new Steam UI update did in June 16th untill today.

My apologize if I couldn't of any help but this is all I've got.