Steam's Performance has worsened so much in the past years

[Neon Henchman]

Feedback (and maybe a call for help) on the crap state that Steam is at now, no joke, for 3 years, I can't play anything for ♥♥♥♥. Not only does the Browser, time and time again, crashes on its own and it resets itself, making me lose not just the 4 windows I left open but it unfocuses from the gameplay I was in, but it also sometimes brings the games down with it when it crashes, there was even this time where I was doing a Serious Sam Deathless challenge, one that takes me 7-8 hours, and Steam freaking crashed in the middle of it, invalidating it as there was no way to save that Run. I also had so much problems trying to game using Countryside Internet, it would not activate the Achievements for certain games 1/4 times and it's just so slow.

I had no such problems before I moved out, and I had reinstalled Steam (using the Installer EXE and not deinstalling my games), but it crashed again just this instant. Even if I could play Offline, what good would that do if I want to get Achievements, get onto Leaderboards, and record Play Time & other Stats in Steam? Some games also have DRMs or stuff of the likes, like simply Online Play. Steam is in such a sorry state, it's about unusable for me, what the hell is this.

[󠁳⁧⁧󠁳⁧⁧󠁳󠁳]

exactly this

[Crazy Tiger]

You might want to troubleshoot your Steam installation. Use the event viewer to find out why it crashes.

I've only had one "crash" with Steam in the past 10 years and that was in the week after they introduced the newer library UI in 2019. The client froze one time so I had to shut it down via taskmanager. Other than that never had a crash.

Regarding the online part, well, Steam is mostly an online service. So yes, achievements, stats and the like are linked to online since it requires an .active connection. However, even in offline mode you can get achievements, they only pop up when you go back online again (and thusly show the same date of unlock on it).
Games have their own DRMs on top of Steam, that's actually advised by Valve in the Steamworks documentation to do so since the Steam DRM is a very basic DRM.

Though all of that is nothing new, since Steam has worked in that way for a long time now.

[Neon Henchman]

Originally posted by Crazy Tiger:

You might want to troubleshoot your Steam installation. Use the event viewer to find out why it crashes.

Well you did taught me of a new tool that I'll sure be looking into often from now on. The errors I got today though are only "DistributedCOM 10016", which the internet claims doesn't matter, and there's "WHEA-Logger 17", which also doesn't seem to be Steam either. Now I should specify Steam didn't do an hard crash today like it did during Serious Sam Deathless, it refreshed/rebooted itself, but it's still annoying that it does that so often as it impairs my gameplay and anything I was working on still.


However, I did found something when it crashed on November 15;

---

Service Control Manager 7000; The Steam Client Service service failed to start due to the following error:
The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion.

---

Service Control Manager 7009; A timeout was reached (30000 milliseconds) while waiting for the Steam Client Service service to connect.

---

Seems like the Steam Client reached the Timeout or could not connect, I don't get it, but like, I'm not happy to find out about it, it sounds to me Steam still has Internet problems on the new Starlink we have, and I have yet to figure out what I'm supposed to do. I don't know where to forward this, it's just becoming so tiring for me to have every single obscure problems on Windows & Steam 24/7, when Tech Support tells me to ♥♥♥♥ off. Keep in mind to I regularly scan my PC for errors, including the sfc /scan thing.

Still though, I think you brought me on the right track in some way, it's better to learn something than nothing in this case.

As for the achievements not working, it may be mostly a problem with Serious Sam Fusion then, that game wouldn't let me unlock anything if it THINKS it was Offline, j'ai pété ma coche sur cette merde.

[Neon Henchman]

I felt the need to share this too; I was playing Betrayer, and because of problems I kept encountering, I tried out the GOG Version, both platforms use the same Settings and Saves, both versions were uninstalled and reinstalled for any corruption, and I've tried both their Online and Offline Modes; I could conclude that Steam made the game crash much, much more often and worse than on GOG. Whenever I'd try to teleport between Levels, it just stops during Loading, I could never get out of the 4th Level, heck the game would claim trying to send me to completely wrong levels! GOG however has much more success when teleporting.

This is ridiculous, both Steam and GOG have the same version of Betrayer, 1.9.6844, so seemingly nothing was changed when it was brought back to GOG this year, and while Betrayer may not be the best optimized even on GOG, I kept seeing a huge performance issue from Steam itself, and before crashing the game, it would use Power like it'd need a nuclear reactor, to then force Betrayer to go into Power Saving mode or something according to Task Manager. I also see that Steam Client WebHelper takes 40% of my Memory, even when no game is playing, like what the hell is this. GOG however, has much better performance in comparison, it still takes 8 or 10% of my Memory, but this is still a ton better than what Steam is doing.

This is not a Steam Vs. GOG thing, but that Steam is actually impairing my playing experience when playing the exact same game, and it's not just that, I keep encountering issues in other games, including on other platforms!; if Steam is running in the background, I keep stumbling on the issue that pressing Start on a controller exits any program I was using it on, so I sometimes need to turn off Steam, when it wasn't even being used, just to play other games.

Steam is so bad and even intrusive for me, I'm so disappointed in this thing I've poured hundreds of dollars into, and to bring back the Event Viewer argument, no, there is no record whenever the game crashes due to Steam using more juice than a jet engine these days.

I reiterate that I've downloaded a Steam installer last week to repair any files that may've been corrupted, prior to this thread, obviously nothing improved. Please, fix this or help me get to a solution, I don't have a NASA PC to run my games. And btw, I still have the issue that Steam has my wrong birth date, it's bothering me so much.

[Neon Henchman]

I may've finally realized my issue; Steam doesn't know how to properly "flush" useless data on the RAM, in fact if I leave it on, the RAM usage keeps increasing to the point the damn thing would use an entire RAM card if it wants to. It also doesn't matter if I leave in on the Library Page of a game, I wasn't doing anything and it reached 4GB of RAM all on its own.

Right now, it's 1773MB, and I can't help but keep sharing the issue, in the hopes someone would suggest a solution, Valve just updates Steam so it stops being a power-hog, or at least give the chance to someone else to understand why they have similar issues to mine. I should add I deactivated the automatic loading of Community Content in the Library, but I do have the little icons on the left of each games, but like... the point is it's still normal usage of Steam, there's no overclocking or trying to overwork it, and I've deactivated one of its semi-common features, yet the problem persists.

Whenever Steam reaches around 4GB of RAM (!), Steam would oftentime restart, but I think it's moreso it crashes then reloads.

[crunchyfrog]

Yup Steam can be really messy with it's memory usage sometimes. It can often build up RAM usage to silly degrees. I don't know the reasons why, but generally I've seen it a couple of times and for me a reboot has fixed it.

But others have it worse. So I don't know what to suggest outside of making sure you don't leave processes open, don't use the inbuilt browser, and don't use sleep mode - always shut your PC down properly.

On top of that try to familiarise yourself with Steam settings - there are options in there to make things runs "lighter" on PCs.

[Leafleap]

I dont know if my issue is the same as OP's, but my searches for similar issues have come up empty.
When I am playing war thunder with a gamepad, the game will sometimes just stop responding to my inputs. The game keeps running, but I can no longer control my vehicle.
The reason this is happening is because steam will have randomly shut down in the background and since steam is handling the controller inputs, the game is clueless to what I am doing.
Even if I restart steam the game wont take my inputs, I have to shut down the game and restart it for the gamepad to work again.
This has happened maybe 8 times now.
This all started quite recently after steam decided to mess about with how the playstation controllers are detected in games, before that I never had any issues with playing with my dualshock controller.
I have been playing with the same controller on the same PC for the past 5 years with no issues until now.

[matrixdll]

I used to think 400MB RAM usage was an overkill, but for the past 6 months it's been nothing but pain with the Steam client. The RAM usage ramped up to 1.4GB at launch and consistent 2-3GBs within an hour of usage, followed by regular crashes.

With them dropping support for 7 and 8.1 I think it's time to move on, until they come up with a better alternative (either a fully functional and backwards compatible desktop Steam OS or a community-developed lightweight client that's compatible with W7/8.1... Yes, I have 10 and I despise their insufferable obsession with DWM and Apple-style walled garden app environment)

[jon09045]

exactly this

[qgo96183]

exactly this

[crunchyfrog]

Originally posted by Leafleap:

I dont know if my issue is the same as OP's, but my searches for similar issues have come up empty.
When I am playing war thunder with a gamepad, the game will sometimes just stop responding to my inputs. The game keeps running, but I can no longer control my vehicle.
The reason this is happening is because steam will have randomly shut down in the background and since steam is handling the controller inputs, the game is clueless to what I am doing.
Even if I restart steam the game wont take my inputs, I have to shut down the game and restart it for the gamepad to work again.
This has happened maybe 8 times now.
This all started quite recently after steam decided to mess about with how the playstation controllers are detected in games, before that I never had any issues with playing with my dualshock controller.
I have been playing with the same controller on the same PC for the past 5 years with no issues until now.

You need to find out why Steam is shutting down then because it absolutely shouldn't.

I'd start with the usual suspects - antivirus et al. Make sure there's nothing in there that's quarantined. If there is, make exceptions for it.

Next start looking at other programs and processes you have running that may be conflicting. If you get stuck try running Windows in safe mode with networking. Run Steam and the game only. It probably won't display correctly or will defulat to a low resolution or something but stick with it, as the point here is to try and see if it runs better and the problems either stays or goes away.

If it goes away then it shows that you absolutely have some software on your system causing the issue and you'll need to find out what.

You can of course also try disabling steam controller inputs and let the game handle the controller too (under Steam settings).

[Lou]

I can comfirm. Since Steam has become a Chrome browser it has become a pain.

Having Steam open (in idle) is a significantly noticable performance hit on the entire system.

A few concrete observations:
It takes a literal minute from double-clicking a shortcut on my desktop until steam has launched itself and begins to load the game. Buying a game requires almost always page reloads (gets stuck on paypal login). The Steam background processes and the rendering of the Steam UI crash randomly but regulary and take the window focus out of the game when doing so. When Steam launches, it grabs the window focus almost 10 times - its impossible to chat or do anything while Steam starts. Having big background animations in the shop grinds Steam to below 10fps. Having then another Steam shop tab open grinds it down to a 2-3fps slideshow. This is on a 3.4Ghz 16GB Ram machine - I can watch a 1080p60 video on firefox while gaming in high quality on the other screen no problem - but Steam on its own is apparently to much for my system. This is only the tip of the iceberg of my experience with the performance of Steam x Chrome since the last big interface update.

My future machine will run Linux on Desktop (I'm coming from windows).
Curious how Steam will perform on it..