protonscr

Steam Performance Randomly Degraded Significantly

steamclosed Steam clientDistro Family: Debian
ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux#13292 · opened 2026-06-05 by kazthered · updated 2026-08-11 · 1 comments · github
Kkazthered 2026-06-05 github

Your system information

  • Steam client version (build number or date): 1780352834
  • Distribution (e.g. Ubuntu): Debian 13 Trixie/kernel 7.0.10+deb13-amd64
  • Opted into Steam client beta?: [Yes/No] Yes
  • Have you checked for system updates?: [Yes/No] Yes
  • Steam Logs: [generate by running this command in a terminal `

steam-logs.tar.gz

`]

  • GPU: Nvidia/Intel/AMD: AMD ATI RX 9070/9070 XT

Please describe your issue in as much detail as possible:

Recently, I've noticed that the Steam client's performance degrades significantly if left open for more than 18-24 hours. Menus will fail to render/take a long time to show when clicked, windows will not change state quickly or at all (eg: changing from "small mode" to "large mode") - Scrolling and hovering will make the application hang for minutes at a time. When this occurs, usually I have to manually close Steam through my system tray. This has a fair shot of working, but sometimes Steam will be so hung up that it will need to be killed in the terminal. Sometimes, it will not even kill cleanly, and I will have to hunt down child processes in the terminal and kill them until they're all gone. I've attempted to get to the bottom of this myself for about a month now, and I can't seem to figure it out- I'm happy to provide more info if needed.

If I manage to successfully close steam, restarting it will "restore" it to a normal state of behavior, but the problem will eventually creep back up.

This is not affecting any ingame performance, from what I can tell, unless steam happens to be in such a state that, when I'm playing a game, and need to open it, that I am better off saving and quitting my game and trying to restart it.

Notable factors:

The only significant change I've made to my system recently was change from an NVIDIA 3080Ti, to a 9070XT. All of the NVIDIA driver data and files I have, to the best of my knowledge, have been removed. I don't see any noticeable spikes in CPU usage or RAM from here when the problem is occurring.

Other things I've tried:

  • Disable all GPU accelerated settings in steam
  • Looked in the logs myself for any clues
  • Completely purge my steam installation (but not my libraries) and reinstall it with no user data
  • Change from stable to beta and back

Describe what you expected should happen and what did happen. Please link any large code pastes as a Github Gist

Steps for reproducing this issue:

  1. Open steam
  2. Leave it open for at least 18-24 hours
  3. See a significant issue with its responsiveness and performance, which will mandate closing and reopening it/killing it in the terminal
Kkazthered 2026-08-11 github

The UI will start hanging and choking the core it's using if it's run out of paging space. That's what it was- closing this since I figured it out. This can be fixed by increasing your page/swap size.

Nothing extracted yet.