Someone's Steam account is consuming a significant amount of system memory.
Someone's Steam account is consuming a significant amount of system memory.
In recent weeks Steam consistently limited its usage to around 150 MB, but now it's regularly exceeding 500 MB and restarting the PC doesn't solve the issue. I'm curious if others have noticed a sudden jump in memory consumption from Steam. While I could afford a larger allocation, I prefer avoiding memory leaks—possibly due to my OCD tendencies. It appears one of the eight web helpers is consuming about 400 MB on its own. Why does this happen?
I never noticed this as I rarely check this out. However, with about 5 minutes of digging I was able to figure out how to lower that 400-500 MB steamwebhelper thing you got going on to around 100 MB. You could say, I found the culprit. Go into your Steam settings then click on Interface. What you are now looking at is the culprit. Which ones take up more MB's is something you're gonna have to play around with and figure out for yourself. What I just did was uncheck everything and select Library on the second option(what Steam window will appear when you start Steam). When I restarted Steam, voila! The MB's went from around 420 to just under 100 and then rose to like 105 over around a few minute span. Now this will change some things so be sure to read what you're unchecking. I'm happy to say though that for once, and... on the first try(by unchecking everything), what it does is actually... how do I put this... fabulous. The fonts are tiny but it sure does let you see tons of games in your library at once on the screen. You might be happy with it, you might not be. The fonts are definitely tough to read since I'm in 1440p. Like I said, you can always play around with which ones to check and what not to see which ones use up the most MB's of RAM. If you ever figure out exactly what each checkbox translates to(it's tough to understand what they each do, at least for me), then let me know. I just want my font to be bigger(which I just found out is the first checkbox and it doesn't use much MB, so I checked it back). It's the one called, "Scale text and icons to match monitor settings". I say check that one back as my MB's are around 109 after checking it and leaving everything else unchecked. So that first checkbox is around 10-15 MB's I would guess. If the 100 MB's or so that this brings you down to is still too much, I'd imagine there's more things like this that you could change. I'd guess this is at least a great start. I'm happy with 109 MB's vs 420 MB's. This is inspiring stuff. I may look into freeing up more RAM like this in other programs. It's pretty much like freeing up RAM in Windows settings. Things like peek and mouse cursor shadows and what not.
It was consistently around 100-150MB after the Steam UI update. I checked everything thoroughly—every setting was unchecked, no tiles, nothing. It always begins in the library. This is quite puzzling. I’ll look into it tomorrow to see if anything activated unexpectedly. Otherwise, this is definitely odd. Usually I use only 13% memory; with just Steam open it’s now around 16%, and even for non-essential apps it’s 3%—that’s really high! Hate it a lot. It also kept increasing, reaching about 650MB before I powered off the PC. A memory leak, I’d say.
It's actually quite impressive. You're at 23% without Steam running and 26% when it's open. Probably because you don't have Windows Defender enabled? It's currently using 390.8 MB. I think that's a solid percentage and explains your current level.
It's unusual... My defender size is typically 100-200MB, but it can spike occasionally. Without Steam open I'm at 11%. My system has strict memory limits for my program, so everything else is disabled. I need to investigate tomorrow—maybe something was restored or added. Also, my fonts are fine, I use Steam Metro which usually uses less RAM. Still had to disable new features like tiles, shelves, and community content because they were consuming a lot of memory even before the normal launch issues.
It's normal to see around 16% memory use. I rarely drop below 40%. Your estimate matches mine. Right now I have 56 tabs across four windows plus eight OpenOffice documents. When launching a game and joining Discord, usage jumps past 15GB—so a bigger buffer would be better.
Hey, we got this! I think it might have been because I did some intense "hacking" with MS Paint yesterday and had to restart Steam multiple times. Maybe that added extra helpers... But even after restarting the PC, it didn’t fix the issue, so I’m guessing there’s another reason behind it.
It's hard to imagine needing that many tabs open at once. Most people rarely manage more than a handful while playing games.