How to reduce the RAM usage of Steam?

[RogerDatSoldier]

It seems that this new UI update added a lot of RAM memory of it, which that chews up a lot of my RAM and that is annoying. Anyone know how to make this lower?

[Elucidator]

You would need to somehow force the developers to either release an older version of the client or implement commands that they removed which reduce RAM.

Jokes aside, Honestly......... there is little you can do.
Chromium is bloated, because they need to use one function from a whole library (and refuse to move it out of the library when they don't need the rest, etc.)

You can use "Small Mode"
You can disable as many features as possible in Options.

You can try to modify the skin, by disabling the new UI for example, but to do that you have to somehow figure out how their CSS works.. and their JS files.
they seem to have minified these things so it looks inhumane / like a single line and there is a lot of nonsense.

sourceMappingURL=sourcemaps\css\library.css.map*/

also the sourcemaps aren't there.

You can use a Beautifier (search for css beautifier for example) to make the code more readable, but yeah, you'll still have to figure out what is what.
If you disable enough elements, they won't get loaded in, so the memory usage would be reduced.

[Iceira]

Other way get more RAM 16gb is seen as minimum, thats mean game has 8gb and apps take take rest, you dont buy a new pc with 8gb, that 16gb or more today. its not said loud enough, because no one think on that part here.


If you have a old pc with 8gb then you can feel the drag from steam update, this has been ongoing for years and now even more.


Just because we are many that know this already dont mean all steam user know this.
i and other could say time to upgrade RAM if pc can do it.

[November]

Just posting this since it helped me. Someone on another memory usage topic suggest this: Create a steam shortcut, right click it, go to properties, and set the target location to:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\Steam.exe" -vgui <you can copy/paste that.

The only change made from the original is (space)-vgui

Doing this reduced my ram usage from 700MB to just under 300MB. All it does is revert your UI to the older version.