Hello all. I’m running manjaro gnome, and an nvidia 2060 super with nvidia-beta-dkms drivers from aur. I mention this, because I’m wondering if there’s some connection between using nvidia drivers and a constant ram issue with steam. I’ll launch the client, and more often than not, the main steam process will swallow somewhere between 120-over a gig of ram, just sitting on the library screen. Not doing anything in particular, just opening up the library tab and sitting there. No idea why. Can anyone shed any light on this?
FYI, I’m using steam runtime, as I’ve been warned off using the steam native package.
Definitely steam memory leak. You have several options:
Report bug to steam
Use steam beta to see if its fixed
Disable hardware acceleration in Steam options
reinstall Steam completely
Use native package from repo
Update Graphics drivers once become available
Change graphics drivers to stable from beta
Thanks. I’ve already tried steam’s beta, and disabling hardware acceleration. I’ve also done a complete reinstall of steam. I’ve also tried the native package, and have kept up with nvidia driver updates. As I mentioned, I’m using the nvidia-beta-dkms package, which right now is on 460.32.03.
Guess I’ll report the bug to steam. Or I could get a nice shiny radeon video card. If one’s available and I can afford it in the near future. 
Maybe it is compiling shaders or whatever in the background. I think there is a setting to disable that. Maybe that solves it, but there’s also a reported cpu consumption bug on the current steam client. If this version is indeed buggy, then try opting in for beta client in settings. Maybe that solves it.
If nothing works then, it probably is a bug upstream and can / should be reported.
How much RAM you have there?
Definitely reporting bug, with full steam terminal log output to steam developers would be advised.
I have 32 gigs of ram. I recently upgraded from 16, but steam’s bevahiour didn’t really change as a result.
I will report this to steam, see what they end up doing.
Ok. Can you elaborate more on:
" the main steam process will swallow somewhere between 120-over a gig of ram"
What exactly is the number “120-over a gig of ram”?
So what I mean by that is that it will ideally take up around 120 megs or so for the main steam process. Most often though it goes way up, climbing to somewhere around 1.4 gigs, which was the most extreme case I can recall.
Please let us know once you hear back from Steam devs.