Why do I have 8 steamwebhelpers running in the background and why one of them takes more resources than the actual games that I play?

[Tanuki]

Title.

Ever since they updated the UI my pc is overheating coz of this crap. Usually I end the task but it tend to come back. I am slowly getting sick of this...

Edit: It seems like one of the steam updates fixed this issue.Thank you lads for the help.

[H.E.A.T.]

hey i have it to but i dont know why

[Demon#TFC4ever]

there's been alot of webhelpers for a long long time, especially when u use the ingame browser, or just the client i guess.

if your pc is overheating because of a few extra processes, i think you need to clean ur pc mate. if it can't handle a full load, something is wrong.

[Tanuki]

Originally posted by Demon#TFC4ever:

there's been alot of webhelpers for a long long time, especially when u use the ingame browser, or just the client i guess.

if your pc is overheating because of a few extra processes, i think you need to clean ur pc mate. if it can't handle a full load, something is wrong.

Let me say it again — one of webhelpers takes more energy and resources than the actual games that I play. It's almost like operating 2 games at the same time on top of other apps, running in the background. Every PC would be under a stress. 7 other webhelpers seems to be harmless.

I care about my unit. This is why I created this post in the first place. I am simply worried that this issue may lead to some serious damage.

I don't understand why is this even needed. I can end this task without any consequences and when I do so, fans in my PC are definitely slowing down, which makes my unit works more quiet.

[[SK] Kaldaien]

How did you arrive at that conclusion?

The webhelpers use < 0.1% CPU, and the only reason you've got 8 of them is because they're doing different things and at least 3 of them are there for security reasons -- there's a high / med / low privilege process running to keep malicious websites from running arbitrary code, all modern browsers use this security abstraction.

https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/09/inside-browser-part1#browser-architecture

With all of that, this is not an appropriate bug report.

[Tanuki]

Originally posted by SK Kaldaien:

How did you arrive at that conclusion?

The webhelpers use < 0.1% CPU, and the only reason you've got 8 of them is because they're doing different things...

How do you explain this: https://i.imgur.com/RY4Vg8y.png (?) - last column is "Energy consumption", which jumps from high to very high if it comes to webhelper.

I am not doing "different things". I simply start the steam to be able to play my games, that's all.

[RiO]

Originally posted by SK Kaldaien:

at least 3 of them are there for security reasons --there's a high / med / low privilege process running to keep malicious websites from running arbitrary code

That's not quite correct, is it?
There's atleast three processes there because there will always be:

1. a process which prevents unreliable third-party plugin content, like Flash, from crashing (parts of) the browser;
   
2. a process which orchestrates GPU access for the pool of renderer processes.
   
3. atleast one renderer process.

The first is not meant for security, but for stability. It still runs content download from the web, and is only as secure as the plugin itself is written. It's just there so the plugin crashing doesn't affect the remainder of the browser. It can't really sandbox anything, because you can't sandbox arbitrary plugin code. (Though iirc for Flash Chromium relies on its own sandbox that Google developed in coordination with Adobe.)

The second is not meant for security, but to coordinate for all the GPU accesses from the renderers, of which the third is actually an instance.

It's the third which is there for actual security. It hosts the webpage content and is sandboxed to e.g. prevent access to file system APIs and such.

[MonkehMaster]

i have 7 that stay running (steam web helpers, not including steam exe).

there is a 8th one that pops up in when going to certain parts of steam, but it disappears almost instantly.

i also dont like all this web helpers nonsense, its bad enough regular browsers have a ton of them, as an example firefox has 6 of them.

quite annoying to say the least.

[[SK] Kaldaien]

Originally posted by RiO:

Originally posted by SK Kaldaien:

at least 3 of them are there for security reasons --there's a high / med / low privilege process running to keep malicious websites from running arbitrary code

That's not quite correct, is it?
There's atleast three processes there because there will always be:

1. a process which prevents unreliable third-party plugin content, like Flash, from crashing (parts of) the browser;
   
2. a process which orchestrates GPU access for the pool of renderer processes.
   
3. atleast one renderer process.

The first is not meant for security, but for stability. It still runs content download from the web, and is only as secure as the plugin itself is written. It's just there so the plugin crashing doesn't affect the remainder of the browser. It can't really sandbox anything, because you can't sandbox arbitrary plugin code. (Though iirc for Flash Chromium relies on its own sandbox that Google developed in coordination with Adobe.)

The second is not meant for security, but to coordinate for all the GPU accesses from the renderers, of which the third is actually an instance.

It's the third which is there for actual security. It hosts the webpage content and is sandboxed to e.g. prevent access to file system APIs and such.

What are you talking about? I never claimed that each of these helper processes has 3 different privilege variants running.

There are, however, 3 of the renderer process at differing privilege levels. My own software used to be injected into the renderer processes and find it very difficult to unload in the lowest privilege trap of death :)

[[SK] Kaldaien]

Originally posted by Tanuki:

Originally posted by SK Kaldaien:

How did you arrive at that conclusion?

The webhelpers use < 0.1% CPU, and the only reason you've got 8 of them is because they're doing different things...

How do you explain this: https://i.imgur.com/RY4Vg8y.png (?) - last column is "Energy consumption", which jumps from high to very high if it comes to webhelper.

I am not doing "different things". I simply start the steam to be able to play my games, that's all.

Old computers are less efficient?

https://imgur.com/a/MHyyNKe

When 0% CPU is being used by Steam, and Edge (in powersave mode) is using 0.5%, there's not a strong case here.

[Tanuki]

Originally posted by SK Kaldaien:

Originally posted by Tanuki:

How do you explain this: https://i.imgur.com/RY4Vg8y.png (?) - last column is "Energy consumption", which jumps from high to very high if it comes to webhelper.

I am not doing "different things". I simply start the steam to be able to play my games, that's all.

Old computers are less efficient?

https://imgur.com/a/MHyyNKe

When 0% CPU is being used by Steam, and Edge (in powersave mode) is using 0.5%, there's not a strong case here.

CPU usage goes up only when you actually play a game. Launch something, jump into a random match or whatever and then take a screenshot.

i7-4400K, 16GB of RAM, GTX 1070, SSD — I agree that my CPU is kinda old but it doesn't justify the fact that stupid steamhelper takes more % than the actual game...

[Demon#TFC4ever]

even with all that, your pc shouldn't overheat under any circumstances, your cooling solution may not be sufficient, especially if you are using the rubbish intel stock coolers.

[Tanuki]

Originally posted by Demon#TFC4ever:

even with all that, your pc shouldn't overheat under any circumstances, your cooling solution may not be sufficient, especially if you are using the rubbish intel stock coolers.

I am using external cooling system. Look... overheating depend on a lot of things. For example, If I want to record my gameplay in a game where I got fps limit disabled, this 10-15% CPU usage from steam helper is a big deal. Small value here, small value there and guess what... Temperatures are going up. ♥♥♥♥ is broken! I am literally looking at the usage of Warframe atm and it sits at 14%... Why stupid helper needs more? This is ridiculous.

[[SK] Kaldaien]

Originally posted by Tanuki:

Originally posted by SK Kaldaien:

Old computers are less efficient?

https://imgur.com/a/MHyyNKe

When 0% CPU is being used by Steam, and Edge (in powersave mode) is using 0.5%, there's not a strong case here.

CPU usage goes up only when you actually play a game. Launch something, jump into a random match or whatever and then take a screenshot.

i7-4400K, 16GB of RAM, GTX 1070, SSD — I agree that my CPU is kinda old but it doesn't justify the fact that stupid steamhelper takes more % than the actual game...

It does not change in any way, shape or form:

https://imgur.com/FBRv7js

Ryzen 9 3900x, 32 GiB RAM, RTX 2080 Ti, RAID0 NVMe SSDs.

Humorously, Epic Games Launcher uses more CPU and that thing doesn't do anything... literally -- it does nothing of any value, it just sits there in the system tray when I don't remember to exit it -- and it still uses more CPU than Steam, lol.

[Im God]

just monoplies bitcoin mining us and we can't do ♥♥♥♥ about it.

[Elucidator]

Not really. Each of them is basically the chromium browser, but some of them incorporates themselves into the same window.
Ones that are clearly different are the Steam Friends window (and yes it is loaded in even if you're not having it opened). The Steam Library also has a seperate --render type Steamwebhelper. (I think this is also why it loads instantly when you switch pages)

Every chromium app (and as such electron app) has webhelpers. (and they also consume a ton of memory and eat processing capabilities and idk why)
it allows webdevelopers to develop programs in javascript basically and with these prepackaged 'frameworks' (of libraries and tools that all install themselves as a seperate entity on your machine with each app and load in a seperate instance of it all in your memory (and video memory) ) it is apparently pretty easy to quickly build something usable.
......
but well...
uh...
if you have multiple chrome-based apps running on your pc you will get conflict issues. Some popups will steal focus and such or conflict causing you to see a window, but not being able to interact with it, etc.
and of course it consumes your RAM faster than Minecraft with All The Mods or Monster or insert any large modpack + server for your friends.
>..>;
Since it's easy to make apps in, people don't really think and cause problems, causing error loops or allocation loops, causing memory buildups, etc.

uh.... yeah.
by the way Microsoft bought OpenAI basically or at least their work with exclusive access to GPT3, so it will take a while before people become so lazy that they ask a computer to do programming for them in public, although that was already tested.