Steam is blocking power saving

[Pixelz]

ISSUE
The latest "spring cleaning" update is causing steamwebhelper.exe to block windows 10 from entering power savings modes. This includes turning off the displays, screensaver, entering sleep mode etc. A search in this forum for "powercfg" reveals that this has been reported multiple times in the past. How many tons of CO2 needs to be pointlessly generated because of the steam client before this is fixed?

OS
Windows 10

STEPS

• Start steam
  
• Click store tab
  
• From a priviliged command prompt run the following command:

powercfg /requests

Which will output:

DISPLAY:
[PROCESS] \Device\HarddiskVolume4\Program Files (x86)\Steam\bin\cef\cef.win7x64\steamwebhelper.exe
Playing video

RESULTS
Windows never turns off the displays because steam is blocking it from doing so.

EXPECTED
Steam doesn't block windows from turning off displays.

[Harle]

I'm having the same problem right now, probably because of the Total War video on the store front page.
Please fix this Valve.

[Kaldaien]

CEF is actually not part of Steam. It is Chrome, more specifically it is what the Steam client uses when you interact with the store / forums.

More than likely what's going on here is that the Steam store has been loaded up, has an embedded video playing in it and then the Steam client suspends the webhelper process since it's inactive. Ironically that's supposed to help with power savings, but if the software is configured to make changes to the Windows power policy (UGH!) and it is suspended without reverting the changes then this crap can happen.

I don't know whether Valve has any control over CEF's behavior with regard to suspending its low-privilege helper processes, but I wish it would stop doing that because it makes my own development work very difficult when webhelper.exe goes into a suspended state while it's got a DLL that I am programming loaded.

The only solution to my problem (and probably yours) is to bring the Steam client into the foreground, open the Store tab and navigate to a page with no flashy background content.


----
TL;DR: Half this stuff is non-functional, but my best guess for resolving this issue would involve starting here:

https://peter.sh/experiments/chromium-command-line-switches/#enable-media-suspend

[shan]

Here is working WA for me:

Start "cmd" as admin, check problem exists

powercfg.exe /requests

Override request:

powercfg /requestsoverride PROCESS steamwebhelper.exe DISPLAY AWAYMODE

and reboot PC.

Check problem again. Profit.

[Kaijin]

Originally posted by shan:

Here is working WA for me:

Start "cmd" as admin, check problem exists

powercfg.exe /requests

Override request:

powercfg /requestsoverride PROCESS steamwebhelper.exe DISPLAY AWAYMODE

and reboot PC.

Check problem again. Profit.

I'm using Windows 7 Ultimate, this worked perfectly.
Thanks!!!

[✪ Checkmate]

Originally posted by shan:

Here is working WA for me:

Start "cmd" as admin, check problem exists

powercfg.exe /requests

Override request:

powercfg /requestsoverride PROCESS steamwebhelper.exe DISPLAY AWAYMODE

and reboot PC.

Check problem again. Profit.

This thing worked for me as well. My computer doesn't go to sleep whenever I am using an animated profile background. Doing this fixed that for me.