Constant memory leak after opening Store page
Can confirm, steamwebhelper does seem to use up a lot more memory with this update. Build 1683078372, on kubuntu.
Happens in the stable (non-beta) steam too and has been like this a long time. At least several months, maybe years.
Same thing going on here, just killed the steamwebhelper with ~12GiB
same thing here, but i seem to be able to workaround it by going to view -> small mode. steam isnt as exciting in the view but does not swallow up my 32gb of memory at least
Same here. steamwebhelper was consuming ~11 GB before I killed it.
OS: NixOS 23.05
Kernel: 6.1.35
Steam Version: 1689034492
Steam Runtime: steam-runtime_0.20230509.49499
X Window Manager: Gnome Shell 44.2
It slowly eats up VRAM until games start to choke or just freeze. This happens both with and without hardware acceleration/rendering/smooth scrolling in steam, overlay disabled. Arch LTS, Nvidia latest stable driver, Xorg.
i think i also just ran into this issue, noticed that steamwebhelper was using 27% memory (of 15.5GB, so ~4.1GB) even though no steam window was open or a game open (steam was only in the background / apptray), but once i opened the library it all got freed (down to 2.3% usage, ~300mb)
Steam Version: 1692390949
EDIT:
i could also reproduce it, though it takes some time to be a noticeable memory increase, for example it starts with ~2% memory usage, and after ~2 hours it is at 7%
I've been running into this regularly on my laptop... This time it happened overnight (Steam was running for 12 hours or so). Only a Steam Chat window was open.
My system started becoming slow and I found out that Steam was using 10GB of RAM, exhausting my RAM and swap file.
Didn't get to test if anything (like opening the library) freed it because by that point it had become completely unresponsive and I had to kill Steam.
This occurred on Ubuntu 22.04, Steam snap.
can confirm mem leak at my steam-headless docker
version 1698777785
same for windows ver
Happens to me on Fedora as well.
gaben where you at? we still need a fix.
This still occurs on windows as well. I've seen it rack up to 14gb of ram while open for ~12hrs doing nothing.
I was wondering why my PC was using 35gb of ram and started to close programs one by one, nothing really did much until I exited steam, from 28gb down to 11gb used, amazing.
still an issue on fedora 43 w/ 6.17.12-300.fc43.x86_64 kernel
Think i found this recently and had claude try and work out whats wrong:
Not a heap leak — it's leaked shared memory. Here's the breakdown for PID 1834393:
RssAnon: 99,672 kB (~97 MB — actual heap, totally normal)
RssFile: 204,404 kB (~200 MB — libcef.so etc.)
RssShmem: 8,710,636 kB (~8.3 GB — this is all of it)
348 shared-memory segments of exactly 25 MiB each, mapped from /dev/shm/u1000-Shm_*. /dev/shm is 8.7G used out of 32G, and 351 such files exist.
And the decisive bit: of the 351 segments, 339 are mapped by only one process — steamwebhelper itself. Their IPC peer exited long ago and the segment was never unmapped or unlinked.
Each hl2_linux64 launch takes out a set of these, and steamwebhelper keeps its side mapped forever after the game exits. Given your workflow here — worktree agents launching hl2_linux64 -devapi over and over against ss_sandbox — you're paying ~25 MB per launch that never comes back. The rate spikes at 10h and 11h line up with heavy test activity.
So it's a Steam client bug, but your test loop is what's driving it hard enough to reach 8.5 GB in ~15 hours.
Nothing extracted yet.
Your system information
Please describe your issue in as much detail as possible:
After opening the store page,
steamwebhelper's memory starts steadily growing. It continues to do so even after closing the window completely, as long as the store was the last page open. Opening the library, or any other page, frees this leaked memory. I had a look, but there was nothing interesting incef_log.txt.This is not a new issue, I have been seeing this behavior for a long time now, on NVidia and Intel graphics, with and without GPU acceleration enabled, in two different notebooks. Only now I noticed just the store had this problem.
Below is a memory consumption graph I made of all
steamwebhelperprocesses; it is very clear that something wrong is happening. The periodic drops look like GC passes, so maybe it points to a Javascript object leak.Note: I made no attempt to adjust for shared memory, so there might have been some amount of double accounting
-silent