Steam and performance.

[TosaInu]

Hello,

This may be something for the Apothecary, but it's closely related to actual gaming too.

I noticed a few days ago that my memory usage and CPU load were unusually high, near the level of exhausting. While I wasn't doing anything special. I have Half Life 2 installed, together with Steam. Steam loads into the tray. I pressed CTRL ALT DEL to check the Windows Task Manager and noticed that Steam was using a bit. Didn't explain the 100's of MB that were gone though. I terminated Steam and immediately CPU load returned from 60% to the normal 5% and over 200 MB of RAM was freed. Any program can have a bad hairday, so ok.

Today I'm benchmarking with aquamark and noticed that the reults differ a lot from yesterdays, both in GFX and CPU. The culprit is Steam again. The difference is over 500 points in graphic and over 1,200 in CPU. 43.1 FPS while Steam is running, 48 FPS when Steam is off. I'm not aware Steam is actively doing any good at those moments, it was just sitting there.

Turning Steam off while doing anything else than playing Half-Life2 is a very good idea.

[KukriKhan]

Noticed the exact same syndrome with Steam & HL2 (a new purchase for me). Its 'phone home for updates' attempts seem to gobble up resources and not return them to the OS when the 'call' is finished.

I keep it turned off when not actively playing HL2, also.

[Uesugi Kenshin]

I wonder if this is still true for steam in offline mode?

My computer upstairs has no internet so I had to borrow someones cable for a bit to get steam acquainted with itself and then use offline mode all the time. I personally hate steam because I do not have access to the internet on a decent computer....

[TosaInu]

Steam is using 10 MB at startup, seems huge to me for a tiny verification. It quickly grows though. I've seen 18, 40 and 45 MB. Insane.

I've not tried the offline mode yet. Does it still load into the tray then?

[Uesugi Kenshin]

Yeah, if I wanted I could probably install on as many computers as I wanted using offline mode at the same time, I have not tried and I will not try. You can play games on LAN and single player as long as you have registered it once. Only redeeming part of steam is that it still allows me to play without internet.

[Red Harvest]

I saw a mag or something really trashing the Steam system recently but it didn't say what the problems were. I'm not an HL player so I don't know anything about it. I don't trust anything trying to autoupdate/verify itself.