- cross-posted to:
- steam@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- steam@lemmy.ml
On machines where you start Steam manually in order to play a game, do you keep Steam running in the background after play session is over? Meaning if you no longer play any game for the moment, and just keep it running to be ready. Or do you close Steam, after the play session?
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I can’t believe so many people here autorun it.
Steam is, objectively, a chonky boi. If I’m not actively using it, why would I want it slowing down what I am actually doing? What’s the upside?
And to be specific, I’m not concerned with RAM usage personally, but interrupts, CPU, networking, vram…
I can’t believe so many people here autorun it.
Me too. I’m actually a bit shocked. The reason why I started this poll is, because I recently saw lot of YouTube people saying they always run it in the background (because of the defense about Steam starting slow, versus the new Epic Games launcher). So I was curious if that is a thing most do.
Also one of the reasons I close it is, it somewhat interferes with gamepads I am using outside Steam. Just one of the reasons.
Also, privacy and security. It’s just good practice not to autorun anything unless you absolutely have to, especially something with as much exposed “area” as a popular client with so many features.
I recently saw lot of YouTube people saying they always run it in the background (because of the defense about Steam starting slow, versus the new Epic Games launcher).
This is a hot take, but I think the tendency to autorun Steam… familiarity?
People like Steam. It’s positive. It’s “on their side” and known, and it auto runs by default, so they aren’t particularly inclined to change that.
I could not care less about how I feel about Steam. I care about the resource utilization I measured and see with my two eyeballs, and I don’t like it one bit. Heck, I’d much rather it not run even while I’m gaming, if I can help it.
I use my PC pretty exclusively for gaming so I actually prefer it to autorun. I don’t notice any difference in performance with it off honestly.
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why would I want it slowing down
It doesn’t. It did when I was using a 10 year old non-gaming laptop, yeah. On my main PC it’s not noticeable at all.
I’m not downvoting anyone here, but I will say just because you don’t notice, doesn’t mean it doesn’t have an effect.
I have a 7800X3D, 3090, 128GB RAM, NVMe SSD, all tuned and running on a “stripped down” Windows install, and I used some benchmarking scripts for Stellaris and Modded Minecraft that I already used for other stuff. Background churn absolutely affected frame time consistency (hitching) and simulation speed.
I imagine it would be even more dramatic for a game that saturates the whole CPU, like Cyberpunk 2077 or something, though I have not tested that empirically. And this testing was on Windows; certain schedulers on Linux (like CachyOS offers) might handle background churn better, though there will always be a tradeoff.
I auto start it and leave it running. I have lots of friends that will reach out on steam if we’re both online to play together. If I’m always offline because steam is off, I’ll miss games with friends.
Wait, the poll doesn’t work? Weird.
I keep it on all the time even though I barely play games because I only have a 100/30 connection available so on the rare weekend occasion that my friends have time to play games, I don’t have to boot it up only to see that the game we want to play of course has a 5GB update that will take me a half hour to download.
Forget about Squad where every file has to be reworked for a 10Mb update so it will max out an SSD for 20 minutes if it gets any hint of an update…
That’s modern gaming in 2026 for you. About the poll, I don’t know why it does not work for you. VPN users are not blocked at all this time (in previous polls I did it was blocked). Otherwise maybe some browser extensions might block something?
I’m almost always using my laptop which isn’t the most powerful so I try to keep open software to a minimum. When I’m using my desktop I do leave it open though.
I don’t autostart it, but yeah, like most programs, I just leave it running once it is. Not like it makes any performance difference. Firefox chews memory WAY more readily than Steam does.
Steam has a whole browser in it, active DRM, updaters and tons of other features sitting and polling in the background. Measuring it, I found it to be heavier than a browser (though admittedly not one with a ton of tabs open).
On Linux, I also noticed it takes a good chunk of VRAM.
I don’t autostart it, but when I do use it, I keep it running until I turn off my computer. I don’t notice any slowdowns, so it’s not an issue.
I close it completely when I’m not playing a game.
Not started on boot, but once I fire up steam, it stays running unless I start up Star Citizen. I need all the help I can get with that mess.
