High CPU usage when steam is downloading games

[Jens]

I've had this problem on two operating systems (Windows 8.1, Arch Linux now) for at least two months. When Steam is downloading games, the download speed tends to go up and down, and as it goes up, my CPU usage goes up a lot as well, to the degree that I can't play any games during the download, and all other programs become very visibly laggy. I'm thinking this is probably caused by Steam uncompressing the downloads, but that's just a hunch.

I'm currently downloading Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and the downloads speed seems to cycle between 5 MB/s and 45 MB/s, disk usage seems to hover between 10 MB/s and 30 MB/s. At peak, I can hear my CPU fan go wild.

My hardware consists of an i7-6700k cpu, a 512 GB Intel 660p nvme ssd, 16GB of ram, and an nvidia gtx 1060.

Anyone else had this problem? Any guesses as to which part of my system might be causing this? Is there a way to prevent this issue altogether?

[Natasha]

I have 3 other clients that have no issues with cpu usage when downloading, time to upgrade this ancient client, my hardware should not be abused.

[[☥] - CJ -]

Game clients may handle things differently, unpacking assets and so forth.
Regardless, Gigabit speeds are going to peg the CPU to some extent.

If you have High D/L and Upload, go on speedtest.net and see how the test affects your CPU usage. You may have to change servers a few times to find one that gives adequate enough speeds.

[Jens]

I got 800 Mbps from speedtest.net, load average was 2.03 at its highest when doing repeated tests. And that's the level I sometimes get from just browsing or using Discord, and my CPU fan didn't start making noise, so I'm pretty sure that my CPU isn't suffering that much from simple traffic.

Interestingly enough, I tried writing random bytes to a file with dd, on my nvme, and it capped out at 40MB/s and made the fan spin! So the bottleneck could be when writing to the disk, though I'm not sure if that's due to my filesystem or a bad nvme.

[Jens]

Nevermind the second paragraph in my last post, apparently /dev/random is just slow, writing to /dev/null (so never reaching disk) only reached 54MB/s while writing zeroes (/dev/zero) to disk reached 1GB/s.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Sounds like either a poor NVME Drive, or its thermal-throttling.

Do an Drive benchmark with CrystalDiskMark and select a 1GB file.

[[☥] - CJ -]

But did you actually look at the CPU usage when doing the speed test, which is what i suggested doing?

High download speeds + Unpacking a game would peg the CPU to some extent
Your fan speed would raise if the CPU got to the temps for that fan curve while downloading/unpacking, so i'm not seeing anything wrong here.

[Jens]

Can't really benchmark with CrystalDiskMark since I'm on Linux, but from what I've seen, people seem to benchmark their disks with dd from /dev/zero, as I did. And to clarify, when I properly benchmarked it (with dd from /dev/zero), I got 1GB/s to 800MB/s, so it very probably isn't the nvme.

Load average reflects the CPU usage, and 2 is pretty low for my system. E.g. when compiling, I get as high as 12. But I checked the % now too, saw a 10% increase, if that. So I wouldn't expect 10 times less bytes to cause the entire system to lock up.

I think it's fair to assume it's just the unpacking that's the issue here.

[DK_Den7e]

I recently started getting extremely high CPU usage when Steam downloads or updates a game. It's not even a matter of affecting games: it lags my whole computer even if I'm not playing any game (I almost always have from dozens to hundreds of browser tabs and other stuff like VSCode, GitHub Desktop, Remote Desktop, HeidiSQL, Discord or Notion open in the background but that's just mostly using a lot of RAM, not a lot of CPU - and I'm not running out of RAM at all when this issue happens).

I'm pretty sure it must be a bug, and if it's a side effect of some recent "improvement", at least make it so we can pick CPU usage % limit for the extraction process, with a generous default of maybe 30%.

For the time being I've tried capping download speeds to 35MB/s but it didn't help. I will try lower but... come on...

My PC is not "current" high end, but it's a 2021 high end gaming laptop with an i7 10750H, 32GB of RAM, RTX2070 Max-Q, 2x1TB NVMe SSDs and a Killer E3100 2.5GbE-capable NIC (using 1GbE), with up-to-date Windows 11 and drivers. I know, CPU-wise I picked the worst time ever to get a high end PC, but that doesn't mean Steam should use 30-80% of CPU with peaks of >90% whenever it's downloading or updating a game.

[[☥] - CJ -]

High speed internet+Downloading+unpacking files/patching/replacing files takes CPU power.
Its normal.

+And you're on a laptop.

[_I_]

decompressing and copying files does take cpu
get over it

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Laptops especially means such a task is going to have high CPU usage, it's normal. Especially when using NVME SSDs. Their very high MB/s writing is going to require high CPU usage.

Mobile i7 are only on-par with a low end Desktop i5 of the same generation.

When Steam is doing its normal routine with downloading a game or updating a game, much of the reason for high CPU usage is because the downloads are compressed. It has to use the CPU to decompress everything during the process.

[Skkooomer Lord]

Usage does spike but it's not very high on my 5800 x3D

[DK_Den7e]

引用自 ☥ - CJ -：

High speed internet+Downloading+unpacking files/patching/replacing files takes CPU power.
Its normal.

+And you're on a laptop.

I'm not asking for a magical free high speed without high CPU utilization, I'm reporting an actual UX issue that, even if such high CPU usage was actually required and normal for the task, even given the not-so-powerful CPU (which I doubt and suspect it's a bug affecting specific systems - given I've had the same system, fast internet and effective download speeds for years and didn't have this issue until a month or two ago - and other people with way worse systems don't have the same problem); they could easily avoid issues by limiting how much % of CPU utilization can the extraction subprocess use by default, and either a button in the very downloads page or a setting that allows tweaking or disabling the limit.

引用自 _I_：

decompressing and copying files does take cpu
get over it

(The above answer plus) you must be an absolute genius when it comes to UI/UX.
If you aren't even able of being helpful, just get over your urge to comment.

引用自 Rikishi：

Usage does spike but it's not very high on my 5800 x3D

I mean, your CPU is way newer, using a completely different architecture, and is more than twice as powerful compared to mine (40-45% more powerful in single thread). Even if I'm right and it's a bug, and even if it affects your system and such spikes shouldn't be normal, at least your CPU is powerful/affected differently enough that CPU usage "it's not very high" and I guess what you mean by that is that it doesn't bother you too much or at all (but if it's the case, even you would be benefitted by a fix).

In my case it's actually bothering, not to the point I would uninstall all my games or Steam, but I'll probably end up uninstalling most of my games to receive less updates (thus using more Steam bandwidth when I eventually reinstall them).

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Ensure to update the BIOS for your Motherboard. Along with getting all the latest drivers for your Intel Chipset from the Motherboard maker. This is not just the Intel Chipset INF, there are others you need. One for System Management and another for Intel RST. If you use an NVME SSD there might also be an Intel NVME drivers a from the Motherboard maker.

All of this accounts for overall system performance and how the OS utilizes your CPU, connected chipset components as well as things like NVME, SATA AHCI, and the various USBs

The OS does not have these needed drivers already without you installing them.

[DK_Den7e]

引用自 Bad 💀 Motha：

Ensure to update the BIOS for your Motherboard. Along with getting all the latest drivers for your Intel Chipset from the Motherboard maker. This is not just the Intel Chipset INF, there are others you need. One for System Management and another for Intel RST. If you use an NVME SSD there might also be an Intel NVME drivers a from the Motherboard maker.

All of this accounts for overall system performance and how the OS utilizes your CPU, connected chipset components as well as things like NVME, SATA AHCI, and the various USBs

The OS does not have these needed drivers already without you installing them.

Thank you for trying to help but everything is already up-to-date and I already use my computer for many other CPU, GPU and I/O intensive tasks almost daily without any issue (other than not being high-end anymore compared to current high-end, specially CPU-wise), this is a recently (re?)introduced Steam-specific issue that might be coming from an intended change on the way the extraction works, but I don't think Steam devs intend for game updates to ever use 80% of anyone's CPU (unless they have one so severely underpowered that it stops making sense to even try to satisfy them or it's just not even possible, which is not my case at all).

BTW, to the other guys, my CPU is still on PassMark's 58th percentile (so it's more powerful than 58% of users).