Why is my Steam Client acting so slow?

Question

So yesterday i downloaded and installed Steam to do some tests on moving the games off it onto my offline PC (for when The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky the 3rd comes out) and I brought Original War and Commandos (the Bundle which has the first 4 proper games).

One thing I noticed was that Steam was slow as hell, not the internet speed (as Original War being ~1.3GB took 20 minutes to download) but the Steam Client itself. If I hovered over a menu option it would take 5-10 seconds before it would highlight and about that long to do what it would do after I click. Likewise when going into a text box to type in my username and password where I have to wait a few seconds for 8 characters to appear. When I try moving the window I click and drag the title bar but it doesn't follow and it can take more than 10s for the window to catch up to the cursor.

As I said this isn't an internet connection problem as at the same time I was on the internet (looking up where the Steam Games get downloaded to) and also about 20 minutes to download over 1GB is a new record for my laptop regarding something that isn't a torrent. I also know my laptop wasn't slow itself because Chrome and Explore was working just fine.

My laptop was a Windows 8 Laptop which got force upgraded to 10 but even then the Steam Client shouldn't be doing this; it's worse than how Minecraft plays on my laptop (which is quite poor - there is lag even on low settings) yet the Minecraft Launcher works just fine.

So why is my Steam Client acting so slow?

Answer 1

The fix I've found is to Clear the Steam application's Web Browser Cache.

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I had this issue for a very long time. A previous workaround was to opt in to (or out of) the Steam client Beta. Only recently did I figure out the more targeted fix of clearing the cache.

Take note, this process and the fix I'm using may not work for everyone - and the batch script I made applies to Windows only. This is certainly adaptable to other systems, though I've never had this issue on macOS or Linux.

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Manual in-app temporary fix

This will help confirm whether or not this is the cause of the slowness. It does of course require some patience:

• From the tray icon: Right-click -> Settings; OR in the main client window menus: Steam -> Settings
• In the Settings window that pops up, choose "Web Browser", usually toward the bottom left.
• On that page, click the [ DELETE WEB BROWSER CACHE ] button.

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The automated workaround:

For my desktop, I have replaced Steam's autostart with a task-scheduled batch script for two reasons:

• The script clears the cache before launching Steam (this problem)
• Task Scheduler allows you to delay tasks until after Network is operational (less chance of network/logon issues)

Script content. Notes below:

@echo off
TITLE CLEAR STEAM WEB CACHE BEFORE LAUNCHING
rmdir /s /q "%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Steam\htmlcache"
mkdir "%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Steam\htmlcache"

start C:\Steam\Steam.exe -nobigpicture

• You can adjust the path appropriately depending on where Steam is installed
• Other answers and articles mention other System paths - but I have confirmed via Process Monitor (from SysInternals) that the path I'm deleting is the only one that Steam itself clears. If someone has evidence otherwise, please let me know so I can add paths as appropriate.
• I launch with the -nobigpicture parameter because, without it, Steam sometimes launches in "Big Picture" mode just because I have a controller attached. This parameter is optional.

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Note that I have given up on finding a "proper" fix for this bug. Rather than clearing out the cache I now use a ramdisk for the affected folders.

In case these clues help another person trying to figure it out, best I can tell this is a bug in the browser back-end:

• There is no obvious reason for the slowness. There is no CPU spike. There is no network latency. There is no disk I/O.
• The browser backend (steamwebhelper.exe) is CEF (Chrome Embedded Framework), a sub-project of the Chromium Project.
• When clearing the cache, rather than just immediately clearing the cache, steamwebhelper.exe is restarted as well.

Answer 2

I don't know if this is still an open question, but here's a sloution that worked for me:

Go into control panel>internet options>connections tab>LAN options and untick "detect settings automatically"

restart steam client.

Good luck.

Answer 3

I found this solution from a Steam community link and it seems to have worked for me

In the Steam window: Steam > settings > interface > enable hardware decoding if supported

This was flagged OFF for me. I turned it ON, Steam restarted and the interface is fine again. After that I turned it OFF again, Steam restarted and the interface is still fine!

So at least by enabling this flag, it triggered Steam to rescan a setting and adjust it.

Seeing the wide variety of solutions I'm wondering what the cause of the problem is. In my case, I haven't changed my GPU, unlike what the OP in the forum link says.

Source: https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/617328967241578199/

Answer 4

I think it's because of the HDD/SSD (your main drive) being too full. Also from personal experience, having cleared up some space on my main drive and used a disk clean tool to clean up temporary files, steam seems to be working normally now for me.