Steam freezes after running for a while

[Davixxa]

This is a duplicate of #8717, but I do not think user's solution actually tends to the underlying problem, as my hardware situation is slightly different, but I encounter pretty much identical problems.

Your system information

• Steam client version (build number or date): 1660960119
• Distribution (e.g. Ubuntu): Arch Linux
• Opted into Steam client beta?: No
• Have you checked for system updates?: Yes

Specs for good measure:
OS: Arch Linux x86_64
Kernel: 5.19.4-arch1-1
DE: Plasma 5.25.4
WM: kwin
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600X (12) @ 3.800GHz
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti
Memory: 16 Gigs of DDR4 at 2400 MHz

Please describe your issue in as much detail as possible:

Describe what you expected should happen and what did happen. Please link any large code pastes as a Github Gist

Quoting the origininal user's problem:
The Steam client freezes after running for a period of time. The main performance is that all windows of Steam cannot be dragged, and this problem cannot be solved by ending the Steam process. After entering killall steam in Konsole, the Steam window still exists and It's stuck and can't start a second Steam process. A killall -9 steam will kill it just fine, unlike original user's problem. Steam will freeze together with the running game, which makes my game experience very bad.

Steps for reproducing this issue:

1. Open Steam (no matter if native or runtime), and let it run. Game independent, and no discernable pattern to the behaviour.

[apelsin21]

I also have this issue, like the poster of the original issue had, it started several months ago. (Exactly like shown in that video) Any game running at the time of the freeze also freezes. It freezes for a time, maybe 10 seconds (both steam window and any game window).

I figured it was a hardware issue causing the bug but after checking my drives, they seem healthy. Dmesg doesn't output anything during the freeze(s), but I started strace before the freeze on all steam processes and it seems to hang on a futex?

After a while steam crashes for me, after 10 or so rounds of Steam freezing;

This is some of the output of " for pid in $(pgrep steam); do { strace -p $pid; } done "

https://gist.github.com/apelsin21/72abe7dbe5a3cddebcf17924fd0963a9

During the freeze, the latest strace output is
futex(0x59098930, FUTEX_WAIT_BITSET_PRIVATE, 0, {tv_sec=5973, tv_nsec=956885752}, FUTEX_BITSET_MATCH_ANY) = 0

System info: https://gist.github.com/apelsin21/cbc07e4b7260b90f6f1b3a9d8b2b036e

[Rosentti]

Do you use wayland? Steam, KDE, Nvidia and wayland doesn't work properly. Could maybe be related to #7245 or #8693.

[Davixxa]

Yes. I do. I use Wayland. Primarily because X doesn't tend to play nice with multi-monitor setups with different refresh rates, and this seems to be the only decent solution to that out there.

[apelsin21]

I don't use Wayland, I use Xfce 4.16

[amit-github-personal]

I also have the similar issue. It freezes right after opening. I am running
OS : Ubuntu 22
Processor : AMD® Ryzen 5 3550h with radeon vega mobile gfx × 8
Graphics : NVIDIA Corporation TU117M / AMD® Radeon vega 8 graphics
Arch: 64-bit

[vilnius-leopold]

Same for me. Recently it has been hanging a lot and the UI has become extremely unresponsive.

OS : Ubuntu 22.04
Kernel: 6.0.9
CPU : AMD Ryzen 5800X3D
GPU : AMD RX 6700XT
Driver: Mesa 23.0.0-devel (git-3440e89 2022-12-15 jammy-oibaf-ppa)

[RobotRoss]

Another +1. Started happening recently, haven't had issues before.

OS : Fedora 37
Kernel: 6.0.12
CPU : AMD Ryzen 3800X
GPU : AMD RX 6900XT
Driver: Mesa 22.2.3

[foxyllakora]

This also started happening to me within the last couple weeks

OS: Arch Linux
Kernel: 6.0.12
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5950X
GPU: AMD RX 580
Driver: Mesa 22.3.1

[laclcia]

started happening to me too. no terminal message about it haoppen it just freezes and need to be killed and restarted to work. freezes can take anywhere from 30 secondes to 15 minutes to happen. i tried running steam with zink instead and the same happen's. i also tried updating to lastest mesa-git and aside from slightly better game performences when i can start one it's the same

current setup:
OS: Manjaro Linux
Kernel: 6.1.0-zen2-xanmod1-1
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 3700X (16)
GPU: AMD ATI Radeon RX 5500 XT
Driver: Mesa 23.0.0-devel (git-ac9af0dcee) (also tried with mesa 22.3.1)

[Visne]

Also happening to me since a few days ago.

OS: Arch Linux
Kernel: 6.0.12-arch1-1
CPU: Intel i5 6600K
GPU: AMD RX 480
Driver: Mesa 22.3.1-1
DE: KDE Plasma 5 (X11)

[dowttie]

Also started experiencing this issue.

OS: Garuda Linux
Kernel: 6.0.12-zen1-1-zen
CPU: Ryzen 3400G
GPU: ditto
Driver: Mesa 22.3.1-1
DE: KDE Plasma 5 (X11)

[Valmar33]

Just adding another report to the pile... also experiencing this.

OS: Arch Linux
Kernel: 6.1.1-arch1-1-custom
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600X
GPU: AMD RX 580
Driver: Mesa Git master
DE: KDE Plasma 5 (Wayland)

[pingubot]

Same issue here, Steam is freezing after start most of the time:

OS: OpenSuse TW
Kernel: 6.1.0-tkg
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5950X
GPU: AMD RX 6900XT
Mesa: 22.2.4-334.1
DE: KDE Plasma 5 (X11)

[regulator-g]

Anyone tried the flatpak version of steam?

[sosodev]

I was having this issue until I disabled "Enable GPU accelerated rendering in web views" in settings->interface. Can anybody else confirm this fixes it?

OS: Pop!_OS 22.04
Kernel: 6.0.6 generic
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D
GPU: Nvidia GTX 1660ti - driver ver: 515.65.01
DE: Gnome (X11)

[pingubot]

I was having this issue until I disabled "Enable GPU accelerated rendering in web views" in settings->interface. Can anybody else confirm this fixes it?

OS: Pop!_OS 22.04 Kernel: 6.0.6 generic CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D GPU: Nvidia GTX 1660ti - driver ver: 515.65.01 DE: Gnome (X11)

no, freeze happend with that setting disabled.

[sosodev]

no, freeze happend with that setting disabled.

Re-reading the thread I guess my issue was a bit different. The Steam window was responsive for me but the client would just stop rendering or it would render but not respond to input at all. :( Weird that Steam is behaving so poorly on Linux lately.

[GalacticalEdge]

OS: Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS
Kernel: 6.0.12
CPU: Ryzen 5 5600X
RAM: 16GB
GPU: RX 6600 XT
Mesa: 22.3.1 Kisak
DE: GNOME 42

I'm having an issue where Steam runs fine for about 3-7 hours until it stops opening and no games from Steam open either. I also see unusual disk read and write occur during this time. I have to manually kill Steam and it works fine until 3-7 hours later...

I think it might have happened when I had Steam open once. I tried to play The Sims 4, but it got stuck at compiling Vulkan shaders. I killed Steam and it worked fine afterwards.

UPDATE: I had another freeze while Steam was open. The client became unresponsive and closing Steam did nothing. I had to manually kill it to work again. I was playing Crysis 2 at the time and it ran fine without problems.

[laclcia]

I was having this issue until I disabled "Enable GPU accelerated rendering in web views" in settings->interface. Can anybody else confirm this fixes it?

OS: Pop!_OS 22.04 Kernel: 6.0.6 generic CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D GPU: Nvidia GTX 1660ti - driver ver: 515.65.01 DE: Gnome (X11)

can confirm it did not fix the issue for me as it was allready disabled.

[kodatarule]

Could this be related to this bug(please note that this bug is only for wayland and nvidia gpu so far from what I noticed, but if you guys have it on xorg it could be something else completely, it's just again KDE Plasma DE):

https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/steam-notification-causes-the-client-to-freeze-hang-completely-kde-wayland/236138

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=462027

[apelsin21]

Could this be related to this bug(please note that this bug is only for wayland and nvidia gpu so far from what I noticed, but if you guys have it on xorg it could be something else completely, it's just again KDE Plasma DE):

https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/steam-notification-causes-the-client-to-freeze-hang-completely-kde-wayland/236138

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=462027

My issue happens on an Amd GPU running XFCE (Xorg).

Also, disabling GPU accelerated rendering in web views does not fix my problem

[kodatarule]

I am able to reproduce the random hang after some time on steam deck as well, it seems like notification triggers it.

EDIT: That is when you are using the desktop session ofc

[GalacticalEdge]

I am able to reproduce the random hang after some time on steam deck as well, it seems like notification triggers it.

EDIT: That is when you are using the desktop session ofc

If you are saying notifications trigger the freeze, can you try doing it where Steam is just running and after like 3-7 hours, it becomes unresponsive. (Running games will continue to run, but you cannot either open Steam or any games from it. If a Steam window is open, it won't be responsive)

[Jay2645]

I am also getting this on Steam Deck (in desktop mode).

100% stock Steam Deck, locks up after a few seconds after getting a notification. This makes the trackpads and keyboards unusable as well. The notification gets stuck onscreen and will not go away.

I can see the process in top and kill it. Reopening Steam will cause the freeze again once I get a notification. If I right-click on the Steam icon in the system tray when Steam is in this "frozen" state, nothing happens for approximately 1 minute - and then the menu opens (usually after I forgot I right clicked). Selecting an option from the menu does nothing.

If Steam is in the background when it freezes, it will not render on the desktop. I can bring the window to the foreground, but it is invisible. If Steam is in the foreground when it freezes, it is stuck in whatever state it was rendering last (so if I was looking at my library, it stays on the library view).

This only happens in desktop mode Steam. Gaming mode seems to be unaffected. Currently on the latest Preview channel, whatever build was active on 2022-28-12. Just checked for updates and everything is up-to-date.

[kodatarule]

I am able to reproduce the random hang after some time on steam deck as well, it seems like notification triggers it.
EDIT: That is when you are using the desktop session ofc

If you are saying notifications trigger the freeze, can you try doing it where Steam is just running and after like 3-7 hours, it becomes unresponsive. (Running games will continue to run, but you cannot either open Steam or any games from it. If a Steam window is open, it won't be responsive)

That issue I am unable to reproduce however I do have the issue which Jay2645 is explaining under Steam Deck(in desktop mode) and on my nvidia PC under KDE Wayland(xorg is fine).
Any notification - a friend entering a game, or your new game is installed or you receive a message - automatically results in the client being frozen, exactly how Jay2645 explains it(both under Stable and Beta, haven't tried Preview).
Right clicking on the tray icon = nothing, if you had the client in the background clicking on it and then trying to click on anything on it = no response.

[Rosentti]

To work around this issue for now, you can use the new big picture. For me, the new big picture does not freeze upon receiving a notification.

[TTimo]

Please try disabling background shader processing to see if this has an impact on the freezes? (Steam -> Settings -> Shader Pre-Caching -> Allow background processing of Vulkan shaders)

[Jay2645]

@TTimo Mine was already disabled and I was still having issues.

[Pistos]

+1 Just started happening about two weeks ago for me, too.

OS: Gentoo Linux x86_64
Kernel: 5.10.52-gentoo #2 SMP PREEMPT
DE: Plasma 5.25.5, with X, not Wayland
WM: KWin
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 3700X
GPU: Radeon RX 580
Driver Version: 4.6 (Compatibility Profile) Mesa 22.1.7
OpenGL Version: 4
Memory: 32 GB DDR4 3200
Steam Runtime Version: steam-runtime_0.20221019.0
Steam client updated no earlier than December 2022

It doesn't seem to affect any games I'm playing. It only happens when I exit a game and do other stuff for a while. When I try to go back to the Steam window, it has stopped rendering. I can move the window around, but it does not redraw. I can only force terminate by way of a mixture of SIGTERM and SIGKILL.

[tomich]

Same thing happening to me on Fedora + wayland + amdgpu right now.

This happened before on fedora + Xorg + nvidia before I changed my gpu and reinstalled. :S

[TTimo]

For the folks who can reproduce this on Deck (@Jay2645) - does this still happen in stable OS or newer (3.4.4) - or you only got this in < 3.4.4?

If you are able, getting a core dump / backtrace with the mesa debug symbols could really help, we're having difficulty reproducing.

[kodatarule]

I am unable to reproduce it on Stable OS, but Beta does seem to trigger it and it is completely random which makes it hard to reproduce. However on nvidia wayland I can trigger it almost immediately(leads me to believe that it could be MESA related as nvidia uses Mesa GBM alongside the proprietary driver for wayland). Perhaps I can somehow debug that ?

[TTimo]

Thanks, we've made some progress since I last posted. It is indeed a mesa hang, that we're trying to work around in Steam. More soon.

[besentv]

So my freezing issues on Nvidia are something different?

[TTimo]

So my freezing issues on Nvidia are something different?

It may well be causing trouble for NVidia's drivers as well. We'll know more once the next beta update ships.

[kodatarule]

Forgot to include this possibly useful information.
I did open a bug report to kde for the nvidia wayland steam notification causing hang and the user David Gow found an interesting trace:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=462027

> #0  __kernel_vsyscall () at ../arch/x86/entry/vdso/vdso32/system_call.S:72
> #1  0xf7b157a7 in __GI___poll (timeout=-1, nfds=1, fds=0xfff68f1c) at ../sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/poll.c:29
> #2  __GI___poll (fds=0xfff68f1c, nfds=1, timeout=-1) at ../sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/poll.c:26
> #3  0xf7cd2b65 in poll (__timeout=-1, __nfds=1, __fds=0xfff68f1c) at /usr/include/bits/poll2.h:39
> #4  _xcb_conn_wait (c=0x5840c2a0, vector=0x0, count=0x0, cond=<optimized out>) at /usr/src/debug/libxcb-1.15-1.4.i386/src/xcb_conn.c:508
> #5  0xf7cd4c7d in _xcb_conn_wait (count=0x0, vector=0x0, cond=0x58c63dd8, c=0x5840c2a0) at /usr/src/debug/libxcb-1.15-1.4.i386/src/xcb_conn.c:474
> #6  xcb_wait_for_special_event (c=0x5840c2a0, se=0x58c63dc0) at /usr/src/debug/libxcb-1.15-1.4.i386/src/xcb_in.c:806
> #7  0xf75160bd in  () at /lib/libGLX_nvidia.so.0
> #8  0xf74fa46b in  () at /lib/libGLX_nvidia.so.0
> #9  0xf615f6e3 in  () at /lib/libnvidia-glcore.so.525.53
> #10 0xf751948c in  () at /lib/libGLX_nvidia.so.0
> #11 0xf74e4192 in  () at /lib/libGLX_nvidia.so.0
> #12 0xedf85cd7 in  () at /home/david/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/vgui2_s.so
> #13 0xedf760f6 in  () at /home/david/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/vgui2_s.so
> #14 0xedf85811 in  () at /home/david/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/vgui2_s.so
> #15 0xedf8cbec in  () at /home/david/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/vgui2_s.so
> #16 0xf1d4408e in  () at /home/david/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steamui.so
> #17 0xf1d46799 in  () at /home/david/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steamui.so
> #18 0xf1d481f0 in  () at /home/david/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steamui.so
> #19 0x5664dc99 in  ()
> #20 0x5664ebae in  ()
> #21 0x56638b30 in  ()
> #22 0xf7a23295 in __libc_start_call_main (main=main@entry=0x56638b00, argc=argc@entry=1, argv=argv@entry=0xfff6f954) at ../sysdeps/nptl/libc_start_call_main.h:58
> #23 0xf7a23358 in __libc_start_main_impl (main=0x56638b00, argc=1, argv=0xfff6f954, init=0x56ab1bb0 <__libc_csu_init>, fini=0x56ab1c20 <__libc_csu_fini>, rtld_fini=0xf7f6c990 <_dl_fini>, stack_end=0xfff6f94c) at ../csu/libc-start.c:381
> #24 0x5663d9f5 in _start ()```

[TTimo]

Thanks - it's a known mesa hang that's mostly due to the xcb API - there's more information there: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/lib/libxcb/-/issues/38

[TTimo]

A new Steam beta client has shipped with a fix for this.

[kodatarule]

Thanks for the update, so far on steam deck I am unable to reproduce it(tested multiple notifications, no issues). However on Nvidia KDE Plasma Wayland the issue is still present.

[dowttie]

so far it appears to be fixed on my end as well, thanks for all your work!

[TTimo]

Thanks for the update, so far on steam deck I am unable to reproduce it(tested multiple notifications, no issues). However on Nvidia KDE Plasma Wayland the issue is still present.

NVidia over wayland may be something completely unrelated. Please make a separate report.

[MerkaST]

I still experience this issue or one that seems very similar (steam freezes, window unresponsive and stops updating, task bar menu opens after a while but options do nothing, possibly notification-related) when launching the beta client with -oldbigpicture. I've found a fairly reliable way of triggering it:

1. Have Steam Link installed on a second device (a phone for me) and paired with PC
2. Open Steam (with -oldbigpicture if on beta) to the Library (other tabs may work, but I mostly tested like this)
3. Move mouse cursor over empty space (hovering over content like games or news appears to inhibit the issue)
4. Leave computer idle, do not move mouse (doing so at any point during the next steps appears to inhibit the issue)
5. Open Steam Link on second device, start network test to PC (Settings > Streaming > Network Test)
6. After the network test has finished, return to the Steam Link main screen and wait until the "Steam Remote Play stopped streaming to device" notification on the PC has disappeared
7. Press "Start playing" to start streaming

At this point, Steam will usually freeze and require being killed (the stream doesn't connect and times out). It might not happen especially on the first try, but after exiting and restarting Steam each time it hasn't taken me more than three tries to reproduce it this way. This doesn't happen when the new big picture mode is enabled, although there is another way to induce a freeze like this with old big picture, which when used with new big picture will result in frozen Steam but also an "empty" new big picture without content and only Sign In, About, and Power menu options which won't sign in and fully freezes on trying to exit through the power menu. I'm not sure if it's the same issue, but I can reproduce it like this:

1. Open Steam
2. Open Steam Link on other device and start streaming
3. Exit big picture mode while streaming
4. Minimise Steam (from stream or PC)
5. Stop remote play (from stream or PC)
6. Wait for "Remote play stopped streaming" notification to dismiss
7. Attempt to stream again

This also may not trigger the issue on the first attempt, but should on subsequent tries.

OS: Lubuntu 22.04.1
DE: LXQt (X11 + compton)
Kernel: 5.15.0-57-generic
CPU: Ryzen 1700
GPU: 2x AMD Radeon R9 380X
Driver: Mesa 22.0.5 (same issues on current git oibaf)

[gino8807]

Was using stable before, signed up for beta to get the fix, still seems to be occurring.

OS: Debian GNU/Linux 11
DE: GNOME 3.38.6
Kernel: 5.10.0-20-amd64
CPU: i7-7700
GPU: RX 470
Memory: 16GB DDR4 2400

Edit, also noticed that my mouse leaves any game I play now and moves to the other monitor in beta, switching back to stable fixed this.

Second edit, had to reinstall my OS for some broken reasons, all is now working on beta, it was my OS it seems.

[Visne]

Doesn't happen to me anymore on beta with RX 480. I'm using Arch/KDE however.

[Visne]

I've been experiencing symptoms very similar to this again lately, where new windows of any program refuse to open until I kill Steam.

[hmpfkafka]

tried both beta and stable and nothing helps, steam regularly freezes seemingly at random and the only way to close it is to kill it entirely. it's actually getting unbearable as i find myself killing off steam every 15 minutes.

[gino8807]

@hmpfkafka what distro are you using? Asking because I was able to fix mine by upgrading from Debian Stable to Debian testing.

[hmpfkafka]

i'm on arch

[kisak-valve]

Hello @hmpfkafka, please open a new issue report so that your feedback can be tracked properly.