Steam & ram usage

Synaptic

Something feels very very weird with Steam and I never had this issue before and I'm unsure what's causing this.
But to simply put in words... Steam eats up all of my 32GB of ram when downloading?

Has anyone encountered this issue before on Solus by any chance? I don't want to point fingers but I remember how on Arch I never had such serious ram usage and i know Steam is a serious chonker when it comes to it, but this is too much to the point my PC just freezes up...

tomscharbach

Synaptic Has anyone encountered this issue before on Solus by any chance?

I have not encountered the issue on my Solus Plasma laptop, but I seldom use Steam on the laptop because Steam overwhelms the setup (8th Gen i5, 16GB RAM). I have noticed that Steam on my Windows desktop took forever to update and load earlier this week, and that might be related. It settled down after that update. My guess is that it is a Steam issue. You might try uninstalling and then reinstalling.

Staudey

I'd say it's more likely that it's an issue with Steam itself. Are you using the Steam Beta or regular version? I've seen some recent changelog items about restructuring the library, reducing number of network calls, etc. Maybe something went awry with those changes.
Personally I haven't experienced this issue (yet). With only 8GB of RAM I'd notice pretty quickly 😆

Synaptic

Staudey Using regular version.

tomscharbach I've actually tried that and still the same... Literally makes my PC unusable as I download the tinest update 😩

Staudey

tomscharbach I have not encountered the issue on my Solus Plasma laptop, but I seldom use Steam on the laptop because Steam overwhelms the setup (8th Gen i5, 16GB RAM)

Steam should not overwhelm that setup by any means. That sounds like a bug too. My 3rd gen i5 and 8 GB RAM have no issues running Steam at all.

@Synaptic Are you also using Solus Plasma? Maybe it's an issue with our Plasma desktop and Steam then, but I find it unlikely.
Anyway, you could try updating to the Steam Beta, or look up some general Steam troubleshooting tips, and see if that improves things.

tomscharbach

Synaptic I've actually tried that and still the same... Literally makes my PC unusable as I download the tinest update 😩

I was going to update Steam later today just to see what happened, but I realized that I already did that this morning -- my Steam on Solus is a Flatpak and I ran flatpak update for Steam, Edge and Zoom. I'm going into a series of Zoom meetings, but I'll open Steam this afternoon and see what happens.

tomscharbach

Staudey Steam should not overwhelm that setup by any means. That sounds like a bug too. My 3rd gen i5 and 8 GB RAM have no issues running Steam at all.

I overstated. Steam sets the fans going high speed if I'm running something resource intensive like Banished toward the end of the game, and similar. I have the same experience with my Windows laptop (11th Gen i7, 16 GB). The bug, if any, is in my head -- heat on laptops is a bugaboo for me.

Synaptic

Staudey
Correct, I'm on Plasma.
I will try to update it to Beta and see.

stalebrim
Until your system becomes unresponsive 🥴

stalebrim

Unused RAM is wasted RAM 👀

ReillyBrogan

Synaptic Let us know if Beta helps at all

ReillyBrogan

I've encountered this with Plasma and 32GB of RAM. Steam eats up all my memory while downloading something until the kernel OOM kills a process (which is usually one of the Steam "fossilize" processes). That causes the download to stop until Steam restarts it and the cycle continues until the download finishes.

I suspect this is due to decompression of the downloaded files. I haven't tested it but likely limiting your download speed in Steam will probably significantly reduce the issue as a temporary workaround.

Synaptic

Looks like

ReillyBrogan Steam Beta fixed the issue so far. Downloaded an update of 4.1 GB and it didn't gobble my RAM in one go. Felt very stable.