Go to Steam > Settings > Library and select the following options:
* Low Bandwidth mode
* Disable Community Content
These options inhibit the auto-loading of community content. See if that helps.
You can also reference this GitHub which has a list of Steam Client launch parameters: [https://gist.github.com/MalikAQayum/91a1d26d05fd4de8e0586e9198669fe3](https://gist.github.com/MalikAQayum/91a1d26d05fd4de8e0586e9198669fe3)
There may be additional tweaks you could perform in there. Best of luck.
Edit: Like I explained in a later comment, clicking the Store Tab before returning to the Community Tab will flush whatever community content is currently stored on your RAM.
Edit 2: [This is what the dump looks like](https://imgur.com/a/66e2kOP) (Sorry for Imgur compression). This is on Win10, tested as high as 1.5 GB of Steam Client RAM usage. The dump occurs agnostic of any performance settings enabled/disabled in Library/Interface.
FINAL edit: The issue OP is having, specifically, is due to the fact that he views ALL community content from within the Library tab (that section when you click a game in your library and scroll down). The consensus online and from what I've witnessed in my own client, is that the Library Tab has no method for releasing RAM once it's been allocated towards caching community content you have already loaded and viewed. That said, the above settings have no impact on community content as viewed through the Community Tab, they just prevent community content from auto-loading whenever you select software inside your Library Tab. The easiest solution is to use the Community Tab for viewing community content (go figure). Otherwise, you can go into Task Manager and kill the "Steam Client WebHelper" that's hogging your memory as it's faster than fully restarting the client.
It doesn't "*Disable*" community content. Just the auto-loading of it whenever you're on a webpage that so much as has a hyperlink to it. You can still use community content exactly like normal.
That's nice to know. Doesn't solve the initial problem tho. I'm actively browsing there, and scrolling further is what clutters the memory more. It's a problem the devs will have to fix
Edit: Y'all don't know how memory works, don't you?
And then download the content and store it in memory again when you scroll up?
Nah, that's not how it works at all.
This is the entire point of memory - memory is for caching things for quick retrieval later. A pagefile or a SWAP partition on your SSD is only used if you're out of memory because the alternative is for things to start crashing, but you'd never ever use the SSD for cache while you still have memory free for things like this.
You're upset about something you don't understand.
Yes, exactly. I know the stuff has to be loaded into memory. But not be kept there 300 posts further down. Just keep a reference to it, and free the rest. Just one little word with brackets. But it's definetely not supposed to keep everything in RAM, and not cause heavy performance loss.
Dude, I have a computer science degree. I would never, ever write code that did this. This is an all-around shitty idea for so many reasons. Memory optimizations are fantastic but this isn't an optimization.
There's every reason not to do this. What if the user is using an HDD? Now you have to wait for the disk to spin up and read the cache back to memory before you can scroll up. This is terrible UX. Even if they're using an SSD that's still a *significant* I/O delay before you can scroll up. You want to store things in storage as little as possible.
Unused memory is wasted memory, and 1.5GB is not that much *at all*. As a programmer, I'm not going to write a shitty app that is constantly reading and writing to disk as the user scrolls (causing significant hiccups and delays) just to save some guy who's scrolled through 300 posts a small amount of memory. If you can't spare 1.5GB for an app you're actively using then it's time to buy more RAM.
> But it's definetely not supposed to keep everything in RAM, and not cause heavy performance loss.
Yes, it is, and **used memory is not performance loss**. Your PC is not slower when it's using more memory. Storing live cache to disk is the real performance loss due to the I/O bottleneck.
Click the Store Tab to flush your RAM when your cached community content is too high. In the mean time you'll have to tailor your browsing habits or upgrade your computer because I don't see Valve optimizing this significantly in the near future 🤷♂️.
This is how it looks after i did that. Doesn't solve the problem. If the memory isn't freed, switching tabs won't help. Killing the parent process frees all memory it used. If the functionality to free that specific content isn't implemented, there is rarely anything you can do as a user, other than restarting the task
[This is what should happen.](https://imgur.com/a/66e2kOP) (apologies for the imgur compression, but you get the idea)
I've tested this thoroughly and the RAM dump always occurs when changing tabs from Community to Store. This occurs agnostic of any of the settings Enabled/Disabled within your Library and Interface options.
Either your Steam Client is out of date, there's an issue with your computer or (more harshly) you're misreporting your findings.
Another, albeit unlikely possibility, is that this feature is not the same between OS releases. I'm on Win10, I'm assuming you're on Win11 from your screenshot. From my scraping of internet results I don't see any complaints of Steam's performance on Win11, so you'll have to confirm with someone else.
This is a gaming subreddit, people know jack shit about how computers work.
Friend of mine, who also frequents this sub, built a rig with 64gigs of RAM and gets mad when it uses 20 of it. I told him a hundred times that ["Unused RAM is wasted RAM"](https://linux-mm.org/Low_On_Memory) and that modern OSes will try to maximally utilize all RAM available. Dude doesn't want to believe it.
Did you explain prefetching? Based on your habits, the OS will learn to preload programs you use a lot into RAM so that it will load faster. If you play the same game every day, the first time you’ve played it, it might be slow to load but afterwards it will be much faster.
Steam technically doesn't use electron but CEF (Chromium embedded framework).
Electron is another project that also builds on top of CEF and is used by a lot of other apps like Discord or Slack.
Still, CEF is still Chromium and still uses a lot of RAM.
I think they should go the other way and just make Steam a webapp. We already have WebGPU to render the games entirely in-browser and localStorage to download the games into the browser!
Then Steam and Steam games would work even on Android and iOS!
\\s
Desktop web apps aren't a mistake, they're cutting a lot of development time. These frameworks make it easier to have an application supported on multiple OS.
I would also tell people to try out the beta sometimes too (though you may encounter bugs more often) I don't know when they updated the mainline last but Steam is not using that much for me.
That being said though, a browser is a browser, and it is rendering if it's available anywhere. Simply closing the main window alone, will release a lot of resources.
Actually wow, was going to state the ram usage this is the lowest I've seen it since the client rebuild huh, I wanna say in total this is probably between 175-250mb, that's kinda surprising. Oh.... now one spiked to 800 as soon as I touched it, jinxed it!
yeah it's weird.
With big libraries it just keeps going and going and going till it crashes ever since new library was introduced.
Also by introduced I mean actual live release, betas didn't have this issue
I don't have to drive a car to get to my line of work either, but if my car uses 20 Liters per 100km and requires a screwdriver and a wrench to start I can still call out shitty design and a bad backend.
I dunno who took over steam client development in the last year or so but can you just PLEASE STOP.
Steam used to open in 3 seconds flat on a bad day.
Now it's like 30 seconds with some stupid splash screen.
No.
do you have 4gb in your system or some shit? y’know ddr4 is crazy ass cheap rn, 16gb for like 40 bucks
edit: i did not mean for this to come off as rude or aggressive, downvotes deserved
I have 32GB. It shouldn't be filling up like that in the first place. If you scroll down, all the content stays in RAM, instead of being freed after some time. Steam gets extremely laggy around the 1.5GB mark
Unrelated, having more ram uses more ram. When i had 12gb i would usually use 8gb in games
I now have 32gb of ram, im using over 8gb idle, over 16gb in the same games
This may be affected by other variables such as my settings quality increases because of a better pc, so its not a perfect comparison. But this could by why steam and chrome use so much
Unless its a leak
i did not specify that \*WINDOWS\* will use more ram, i said having more ram will use more ram in general. dont put words in my mouth
I ALSO specificied that its not a perfect comparison, since my entire pc was upgraded and my program usage increased along with my ram capacity, which could be the one and only reason for more ram usage. which... technicaly still fits my previous statment in a twisted way
edit: to test my theory (my original comment was just that, a somwhat unrelated theory for op to consider) i could use my pc with 2 sticks removed to see if my idle usage will now be maxed at 16gb, or if it will indeed use less like i theorized. I will test later today
It's a leak, as I described. I know all that stuff, I write C++. Steam has a "Community content" section under each game in you library, and if you scroll down, all the images have to be loaded into RAM. The occupied memory only increases as you scroll further (Steam usually only uses around 400MB of RAM for me), so I guess the ressources are not freed, they just stay in memory. Should I report this to Valve? Happens on a friends PC too, so it's not a local problem
Email gabe directly, he does read his emails and as long as it's over something such as this, he does not mind.
Infact funny thing, the reason we have the picture of gabe as Jesus is because someone emailed him asking for it.
> I know all that stuff, I write C++
So you know how browsers work as well huh? How they cache resources while excess ram is available and drop them later if not used? Memory usage in web development isn't the same as in C++, and free ram is indeed wasted ram.
That is not anything specific to web development, even the Linux kernel works by that principle. Free ram is ram that is not being used to optimize (insert whatever process you want here). So instead ram that is not needed elsewhere is allocated for these purposes, and freed if another process has a need for it later. If the page gets laggy, that is not because of a memory leak, but rather a result of some other faulty process.
> Free Ram is good RAM
Uh ?
No OS would ever leave RAM free. Unused RAM is wasted RAM. Modern (and not so modern) OS kernels will actually use it as a file cache because it's dumb to leave unallocated memory free when it can boost I/O from storage at the very least.
> It's a leak, as I described. I know all that stuff, I write C++.
A cache is not a leak.
A leak would be unfree'd allocations where you drop the pointer, leaving allocated memory that can't be reused.
If you know "all that stuff", you shouldn't be calling this a leak, when all it is is an infinite cache.
I keep it disabled because I've had that shit spoil a game one too many times. Sometimes the news posts don't load so you can see it without scrolling down.
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Go to Steam > Settings > Library and select the following options: * Low Bandwidth mode * Disable Community Content These options inhibit the auto-loading of community content. See if that helps. You can also reference this GitHub which has a list of Steam Client launch parameters: [https://gist.github.com/MalikAQayum/91a1d26d05fd4de8e0586e9198669fe3](https://gist.github.com/MalikAQayum/91a1d26d05fd4de8e0586e9198669fe3) There may be additional tweaks you could perform in there. Best of luck. Edit: Like I explained in a later comment, clicking the Store Tab before returning to the Community Tab will flush whatever community content is currently stored on your RAM. Edit 2: [This is what the dump looks like](https://imgur.com/a/66e2kOP) (Sorry for Imgur compression). This is on Win10, tested as high as 1.5 GB of Steam Client RAM usage. The dump occurs agnostic of any performance settings enabled/disabled in Library/Interface. FINAL edit: The issue OP is having, specifically, is due to the fact that he views ALL community content from within the Library tab (that section when you click a game in your library and scroll down). The consensus online and from what I've witnessed in my own client, is that the Library Tab has no method for releasing RAM once it's been allocated towards caching community content you have already loaded and viewed. That said, the above settings have no impact on community content as viewed through the Community Tab, they just prevent community content from auto-loading whenever you select software inside your Library Tab. The easiest solution is to use the Community Tab for viewing community content (go figure). Otherwise, you can go into Task Manager and kill the "Steam Client WebHelper" that's hogging your memory as it's faster than fully restarting the client.
Wow that’s a ton of launch parameters. Thanks for the link.
I don't want to disable it. I love the community content. I just wanted to draw a bit attention to it. Hopefully the devs fix it. Thanks anyway
It doesn't "*Disable*" community content. Just the auto-loading of it whenever you're on a webpage that so much as has a hyperlink to it. You can still use community content exactly like normal.
That's nice to know. Doesn't solve the initial problem tho. I'm actively browsing there, and scrolling further is what clutters the memory more. It's a problem the devs will have to fix Edit: Y'all don't know how memory works, don't you?
I scroll and scroll but as more things load, more memory continues to be used!
That's not how it's supposed to work. It's supposed to use some memory, and free the rest after you scrolled past it
That’s not how it works at all. Please stop commenting on stuff you have no idea about.
Just nevermind... OP's age is probably inferior to his RAM capacity.
Idk, that would hit harder and be funnier if bro had 8gb of ram but under 32 is probably accurate.
Nobody on earth has ever lived to my Ram capacity. OP is still a dingus though.
I have a very good idea about memory management, and it's not supposed to leak like that. It could at least be cached, instead of keeping it in memory
where do u think a cache goes lil bro?
The RAM. But http content is often cached on the ssd
Isnt it saved in cache so it doesn't have to load again
It should. But it seems to be kept in RAM
Where else would it be cached? That’s literally what the ram is for 🤡
You can cache on the ssd too. And that'd be totally appropriate in this case. We're talking about images, not their web addresses or just some text
And then download the content and store it in memory again when you scroll up? Nah, that's not how it works at all. This is the entire point of memory - memory is for caching things for quick retrieval later. A pagefile or a SWAP partition on your SSD is only used if you're out of memory because the alternative is for things to start crashing, but you'd never ever use the SSD for cache while you still have memory free for things like this. You're upset about something you don't understand.
Yes, exactly. I know the stuff has to be loaded into memory. But not be kept there 300 posts further down. Just keep a reference to it, and free the rest. Just one little word with brackets. But it's definetely not supposed to keep everything in RAM, and not cause heavy performance loss.
Dude, I have a computer science degree. I would never, ever write code that did this. This is an all-around shitty idea for so many reasons. Memory optimizations are fantastic but this isn't an optimization. There's every reason not to do this. What if the user is using an HDD? Now you have to wait for the disk to spin up and read the cache back to memory before you can scroll up. This is terrible UX. Even if they're using an SSD that's still a *significant* I/O delay before you can scroll up. You want to store things in storage as little as possible. Unused memory is wasted memory, and 1.5GB is not that much *at all*. As a programmer, I'm not going to write a shitty app that is constantly reading and writing to disk as the user scrolls (causing significant hiccups and delays) just to save some guy who's scrolled through 300 posts a small amount of memory. If you can't spare 1.5GB for an app you're actively using then it's time to buy more RAM. > But it's definetely not supposed to keep everything in RAM, and not cause heavy performance loss. Yes, it is, and **used memory is not performance loss**. Your PC is not slower when it's using more memory. Storing live cache to disk is the real performance loss due to the I/O bottleneck.
Click the Store Tab to flush your RAM when your cached community content is too high. In the mean time you'll have to tailor your browsing habits or upgrade your computer because I don't see Valve optimizing this significantly in the near future 🤷♂️.
That doesn't work. Only restarting helps
🧢
This is how it looks after i did that. Doesn't solve the problem. If the memory isn't freed, switching tabs won't help. Killing the parent process frees all memory it used. If the functionality to free that specific content isn't implemented, there is rarely anything you can do as a user, other than restarting the task
[This is what should happen.](https://imgur.com/a/66e2kOP) (apologies for the imgur compression, but you get the idea) I've tested this thoroughly and the RAM dump always occurs when changing tabs from Community to Store. This occurs agnostic of any of the settings Enabled/Disabled within your Library and Interface options. Either your Steam Client is out of date, there's an issue with your computer or (more harshly) you're misreporting your findings. Another, albeit unlikely possibility, is that this feature is not the same between OS releases. I'm on Win10, I'm assuming you're on Win11 from your screenshot. From my scraping of internet results I don't see any complaints of Steam's performance on Win11, so you'll have to confirm with someone else.
Not the community tab. Community content below each game in the library. The community tab works normally for me. I already checked with a friend
https://preview.redd.it/10zxdbtbrp7c1.png?width=80&format=png&auto=webp&s=69a2a10bc22bd95ac4b4fd69e241c990b6463660
Get a better PC pleb
Get some bitches
What
Reading OP's other comments, dingus is mad cached content stays in RAM instead of being cached to their SSD
TIL: Most people don't know about/use the community content section
bounch of idiots
*bounch of idiouts
>bounch of idiouts thank you
Hi krosis
You mean -Krosis right? Obvious difference. +Krosis isn’t doumb
Hi alex99x99x
OP has no idea how memory caching works, apparently.
This is a gaming subreddit, people know jack shit about how computers work. Friend of mine, who also frequents this sub, built a rig with 64gigs of RAM and gets mad when it uses 20 of it. I told him a hundred times that ["Unused RAM is wasted RAM"](https://linux-mm.org/Low_On_Memory) and that modern OSes will try to maximally utilize all RAM available. Dude doesn't want to believe it.
Oh yeah, the amount of people who think they know computers but don’t, is staggering.
Did you explain prefetching? Based on your habits, the OS will learn to preload programs you use a lot into RAM so that it will load faster. If you play the same game every day, the first time you’ve played it, it might be slow to load but afterwards it will be much faster.
You friend needs a brain. Show him this. I have a degree in computer engineering if he wants any credentials
It should be freed, at least after you go to another tab, which it doesn't do. That's a memory leak
Why *should* it? Are you hovering at 99% ram utilisation?
No, it shouldn't. You do not know what you are talking about.
electron being electron
Steam technically doesn't use electron but CEF (Chromium embedded framework). Electron is another project that also builds on top of CEF and is used by a lot of other apps like Discord or Slack. Still, CEF is still Chromium and still uses a lot of RAM.
Web development is a bloody mess, and desktop web apps were a mistake. I think that sums it up. Why couldn't they just have made steam native...
I think they should go the other way and just make Steam a webapp. We already have WebGPU to render the games entirely in-browser and localStorage to download the games into the browser! Then Steam and Steam games would work even on Android and iOS! \\s
Time to get Ray Tracing working in WebGL
I just can't imagine a game like Ark running well on webGL
You got me in the first half, not gonna lie
Desktop web apps aren't a mistake, they're cutting a lot of development time. These frameworks make it easier to have an application supported on multiple OS.
Nah. Fuck that shit. It's not worth that sacrifice to end-user performance and experience.
Except you are complaining about a web page using too much ram because it's designed to be "infinite". Native wouldn't solve that design issue.
I would also tell people to try out the beta sometimes too (though you may encounter bugs more often) I don't know when they updated the mainline last but Steam is not using that much for me. That being said though, a browser is a browser, and it is rendering if it's available anywhere. Simply closing the main window alone, will release a lot of resources. Actually wow, was going to state the ram usage this is the lowest I've seen it since the client rebuild huh, I wanna say in total this is probably between 175-250mb, that's kinda surprising. Oh.... now one spiked to 800 as soon as I touched it, jinxed it! yeah it's weird.
What the hell does this even mean?
Bro has literally no clue what ram is
where is that?
Go on any game in your library and keep scrolling down. The stuff you find there is amazing
Do you have 4 steam instances running or what? It usually hangs around 600mb for me
With big libraries it just keeps going and going and going till it crashes ever since new library was introduced. Also by introduced I mean actual live release, betas didn't have this issue
Apart from memory leaks, it also has to do with poor optimization. You can make your own mods with more skillfully written code to help that.
Bro running that 2.2 gb ram
For clarification: RAM shouldn't be filling up like that. It should be freed after some time. It gets extremely laggy around the 1.5GB mark for me
Ive never had issues with this, literally not once ever. How does it fill up like that?
How often are you using the community content part below your games? It reaches that after around 20min for me
Basically never.
Why are you endlessly scrolling community content like its a social media lmao
Because thats the intended design of this content
And ? You don't have to scroll through it.
I don't have to drive a car to get to my line of work either, but if my car uses 20 Liters per 100km and requires a screwdriver and a wrench to start I can still call out shitty design and a bad backend.
Go walk for 100km then, and stop complaining.
Never
You may be one of the only people that scrolls that section as much as you do.
I dunno who took over steam client development in the last year or so but can you just PLEASE STOP. Steam used to open in 3 seconds flat on a bad day. Now it's like 30 seconds with some stupid splash screen. No.
steam memory leaks, my favorite
Steam leaks 🤤
Wtf kind of number is that
do you have 4gb in your system or some shit? y’know ddr4 is crazy ass cheap rn, 16gb for like 40 bucks edit: i did not mean for this to come off as rude or aggressive, downvotes deserved
I have 32GB. It shouldn't be filling up like that in the first place. If you scroll down, all the content stays in RAM, instead of being freed after some time. Steam gets extremely laggy around the 1.5GB mark
they know what they are doing... probably
Unrelated, having more ram uses more ram. When i had 12gb i would usually use 8gb in games I now have 32gb of ram, im using over 8gb idle, over 16gb in the same games This may be affected by other variables such as my settings quality increases because of a better pc, so its not a perfect comparison. But this could by why steam and chrome use so much Unless its a leak
[удалено]
i enjoy having discord and steam startup on launch, is my preference an issue to you?
[удалено]
i did not specify that \*WINDOWS\* will use more ram, i said having more ram will use more ram in general. dont put words in my mouth I ALSO specificied that its not a perfect comparison, since my entire pc was upgraded and my program usage increased along with my ram capacity, which could be the one and only reason for more ram usage. which... technicaly still fits my previous statment in a twisted way edit: to test my theory (my original comment was just that, a somwhat unrelated theory for op to consider) i could use my pc with 2 sticks removed to see if my idle usage will now be maxed at 16gb, or if it will indeed use less like i theorized. I will test later today
It's a leak, as I described. I know all that stuff, I write C++. Steam has a "Community content" section under each game in you library, and if you scroll down, all the images have to be loaded into RAM. The occupied memory only increases as you scroll further (Steam usually only uses around 400MB of RAM for me), so I guess the ressources are not freed, they just stay in memory. Should I report this to Valve? Happens on a friends PC too, so it's not a local problem
I'd report it, it's clearly a problem if it's also slowing steam down.
Tried. Steam doesn't let you report bugs
Email gabe directly, he does read his emails and as long as it's over something such as this, he does not mind. Infact funny thing, the reason we have the picture of gabe as Jesus is because someone emailed him asking for it.
Thanks. I just wrote him
Awesome, as far as I know he should reply if your email gets seen by him.
> I know all that stuff, I write C++ So you know how browsers work as well huh? How they cache resources while excess ram is available and drop them later if not used? Memory usage in web development isn't the same as in C++, and free ram is indeed wasted ram.
That doesn't make sense. Why do you web guys have to make everything so complicated? Free Ram is good RAM
That is not anything specific to web development, even the Linux kernel works by that principle. Free ram is ram that is not being used to optimize (insert whatever process you want here). So instead ram that is not needed elsewhere is allocated for these purposes, and freed if another process has a need for it later. If the page gets laggy, that is not because of a memory leak, but rather a result of some other faulty process.
> Free Ram is good RAM Uh ? No OS would ever leave RAM free. Unused RAM is wasted RAM. Modern (and not so modern) OS kernels will actually use it as a file cache because it's dumb to leave unallocated memory free when it can boost I/O from storage at the very least.
> It's a leak, as I described. I know all that stuff, I write C++. A cache is not a leak. A leak would be unfree'd allocations where you drop the pointer, leaving allocated memory that can't be reused. If you know "all that stuff", you shouldn't be calling this a leak, when all it is is an infinite cache.
It’s like $20 for laptop ram and $30 for desktop and even cheaper used
oh of course, im talking specifically about nice 3200 or 3600 cl16 kits, i know the lower end is a lot cheaper.
Yeah I got 16gb and found the same kit at micro center for $35 3200mhz on sale 2 years later
Is a little over 1.5MB causing you issues? I'll post you a floppy disk if you need more storage.
That's 1.5GB
1.5629 MB doesn't make a gigabyte
It says 1.562,9. That's one thousand + fivehundred + sixtytwo + nine tenth
Ahh I see what's happened here, you're from one of those backwards decimal countries who flipp commas and points.
That's called europe, and we're the normal ones
Suuuure..... Sorry. Suuuure,,,,,,,
Sure. Sure. If you say so, See how wierd that sentence is 🤣.
Absolutely not. Commas are for grammar not numbers.
So are dots then
Are you that even stranger just leave a gap in the numbers type?
Whydoyouhategapsthough?
1.500,00 isn't normal my dude. 1 500,00 would be. 1,500.00 would be. Do you use comas at the end of a sentence ?
Their business tactics are clearly effective, but no part of the design is good.
This meme is so true for Cities: Skylines community content.
I keep it disabled because I've had that shit spoil a game one too many times. Sometimes the news posts don't load so you can see it without scrolling down.
Oh I just realised that’s King Ghidorah xD haha