Anyway to get Steam to use less physical memory?

[kijib]

new update is costing me over 800 MB, almost as much as 12 Edge tabs, ridiculous!

screw this bloatware, man

[CYAN1D3 XIII]

引用自 Blood：

引用自 Ogami：

To play devils advocate, its 2023. I been on 32 GB of RAM for like 5 years now and plan to upgrade to 64GB soon. RAM is dirt cheap at the moment with a branded 32 GB kit available under 100 bucks in most stores.
With updates and new tech the system requirements for RAM usage will raise over time, it always happened.

So i am not too worried about a few hundred MB usage of the Steam client to be honest.
But i can also see how its bothersome to some users who have older systems or not much system RAM.

Even so, a game launcher shouldn't use 1% of your RAM.

Its not even technically a launcher. Every game you download still has its own launcher that has to launch independently. So theres even less excuse

[cryrp]

bro the steam client is basically chromium. of course it's going to use 500 to 800mb of RAM. get over it. unless ur rocking a 8gb PC you shouldn't worry about it

[Cold_Killer]

You can follow this guide to disable most of the "clutter" from the client for your gaming sessions:
https://www.howtogeek.com/694531/how-to-reduce-steams-ram-usage-from-400-mb-to-60-mb/

[RPG Gamer Man]

引用自 𒈙𒈙r ⁧ p 𒈙𒈙：

bro the steam client is basically chromium. of course it's going to use 500 to 800mb of RAM. get over it. unless ur rocking a 8gb PC you shouldn't worry about it

Even google admitted their browser uses more memory than firefox officially. This is why i prefer to use other browsers other than google now. Apparently, they have been working to reduce memory usage, but considering how most companies, even cellphone companies lie about slowing down your phones on purpose to force you to upgrade to newer ones does not make any company that is technology based nowadays not trustworthy.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/apple-to-start-paying-out-500m-in-iphone-slowdown-lawsuit/

https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/google-chrome-memory-usage/

https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/chrome-110-heralds-new-memory-efficiency-and-low-power-modes/

I don't think their fix above actually fixed the issue fully though..

[cryrp]

引用自 RPG Gamer Man：

引用自 𒈙𒈙r ⁧ p 𒈙𒈙：

bro the steam client is basically chromium. of course it's going to use 500 to 800mb of RAM. get over it. unless ur rocking a 8gb PC you shouldn't worry about it

Even google admitted their browser uses more memory than firefox officially. This is why i prefer to use other browsers other than google now. Apparently, they have been working to reduce memory usage, but considering how most companies, even cellphone companies lie about slowing down your phones on purpose to force you to upgrade to newer ones does not make any company that is technology based nowadays not trustworthy.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/apple-to-start-paying-out-500m-in-iphone-slowdown-lawsuit/

https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/google-chrome-memory-usage/

https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/chrome-110-heralds-new-memory-efficiency-and-low-power-modes/

I don't think their fix above actually fixed the issue fully though..

same, I am a firefox enjoyer. Love Mental Outlaw's guide on how to harden your firefox.

[¡Viva Cristo Rey!]

https://www.makeuseof.com/how-to-stop-steam-web-helper-use-all-ram/

Create .bat file with:
"cd /d "%~dp0"
start steam.exe -dev -console -nofriendsui -no-dwrite -nointro -nobigpicture -nofasthtml -nocrashmonitor -noshaders -no-shared-textures -disablehighdpi -cef-single-process -cef-in-process-gpu -single_core -cef-disable-d3d11 -cef-disable-sandbox -disable-winh264 -cef-force-32bit -no-cef-sandbox -vrdisable -cef-disable-breakpad"
in your steam.exe directory. Run bat file when you want to launch game. Managed to launch skyrim in this state, steam only using 27MB

[Vincent13122]

引用自 ¡Viva Cristo Rey!：

https://www.makeuseof.com/how-to-stop-steam-web-helper-use-all-ram/

Create .bat file with:
"cd /d "%~dp0"
start steam.exe -dev -console -nofriendsui -no-dwrite -nointro -nobigpicture -nofasthtml -nocrashmonitor -noshaders -no-shared-textures -disablehighdpi -cef-single-process -cef-in-process-gpu -single_core -cef-disable-d3d11 -cef-disable-sandbox -disable-winh264 -cef-force-32bit -no-cef-sandbox -vrdisable -cef-disable-breakpad"
in your steam.exe directory. Run bat file when you want to launch game. Managed to launch skyrim in this state, steam only using 27MB

I used this a few months ago and one of these commands seems to have a bug causing a random windows process to use 20% cpu. It only happened after a few hours of having steam open usually but it stopped as soon as I closed steam or stopped using these launch commands. Sadly I dont know which command did it and I dont know if this might just be specific to my pc but maybe watch out if your pc slows down all of the sudden

[Chris is Awesome]

Reviving this since I found the problem and a simple fix. Every time you launch a game, Steam permanently hogs ~50MB of memory. This is due to the Steam Overlay failing to get fully removed from memory after a game closes. You can see this by looking in Task Manager's details tab, and looking at the instance of `steamwebhelper.exe` that has the most working memory (you may need to add the working memory tab).

Having overlay off allows working memory to return to where it was before you launched the game. But having it on results in a loss of 40-50MB per launch.

This is a small amount sure, but it adds up over time, and only resets if you restart Steam. In my case, I mod a game which I launch through Steam, so I can be launching the same game hundreds of times in a day. Launching it 100 times makes me lose ~500MB of my 32GB. This makes a huge difference over weeks.

This is why Chromium web apps are bad and should not be the standard.

So tl;dr: Either disable Steam overlay for games you launch frequently or restart Steam periodically.

[Vincent13122]

Thats really good to know, thank you!

[Mike]

This thread was quite old before the recent post, so we're locking it to prevent confusion.