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Comment by prezjordan | Hacker News Reader

Sort of off-topic, is there a reason Steam on windows is so unresponsive? Mac, too, but I think that's because it's a port.

It seems to me that Steam is not written in native windows code and that's why it runs so sluggishly. Some say they have no idea what I'm talking about, while others agree. What does HN think?

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They use their own UI toolkit called VGUI, the same one they use in HL2 and their other games (https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/VGUI_Documentation). So, there is a layer on top, but in terms of rendering it should be all native. In their games, it uses Direct3D calls, and in Windows I would guess it uses GDI+ or something in the DirectX family.

Edit: Just to be clear, I would consider the VGUI layer to be pretty lightweight. There is no virtual machine for any language runtimes. It is purely a layout engine, with some very basic styling defined mainly by the rendering of images and gradients.

Outside of rendering, from my own experience with using it, there's nothing in particular about it that makes it slow, except that it has no built-in asynchronous facilities in place for you to use. You have to make sure you never block the UI thread.

This is really just a guess of course, but I would pin the slowness on too much IO waiting (ie. poor thread design). To be fair though, Steam in most cases has stayed pretty responsive.

I would rather put my money on not threaded well. The application thread seems to get blocked whenever it's chugging on something important, which locks up the UI.

Define "so unresponsive".

Recently (less than a year ago), I had a switch in hardware from a Athlon X2 3200+, 4GB RAM machine to an i5-2500K, 8GB RAM and 2 SSDs. Sure there was a noticeable difference in responsiveness, but never on either machine would I consider Steam "so unresponsive".

My last machine was an i7 920 with 12GB and Intel 80GB SSD; I now have an i7-3770K with 16GB and Samsung 256GB SSD; and Steam has always been fairly unresponsive.

Specifically, it's most unresponsive on the "preparing disk space" page when installing games. It takes multiple seconds for no apparent reason. There's no high CPU usage and no high I/O usage. It's also very slow to start, and very slow to let me play a game.

My theory is it's due to some degree of online activity, that it's gated on my internet bandwidth. Since I only play single-player games, that's a huge annoyance to me, and I often don't start playing games because I know I'll have to sit through Steam startup for several seconds.

Steam does have a very slow boot time, but the expected behavior is that Steam is always running in the background so I can't imagine it's a priority. I can't fathom a ~3 second wait when installing and launching a game being a real problem. Minor annoyance sure but that's less time than you'll be forced to see stupid splash screens for!

I just quit Steam (so it was fresh in cache, never mind relying on SSD etc.), and started a Steam game. It took 20 seconds before the game launched (not playable, just started).

That's massive. Pretty much any of my non-steam games will be launched and playable within 10 seconds.

(I also hate unskippable intro videos; I'm fairly sure I've collectively spent much longer searching for ways to delete / skip such videos than I have ever lost watching them.)

With Steam already running the moment I double-click an installed game from my list it's taking about 2-3 seconds before they pop open full screen. If you're taking 20 seconds then it may or may not be Steam's fault, but it certainly isn't an intrinsic property of the software.

Sure, but my point is that I tried it without Steam running (most of the time seems spent on logging in to my account). I don't run Steam by default - it'll be updating, downloading patches, popping up notifications and all sorts interfering with my daily life.

That is neither the expected nor the standard use case. If you use a product in a way it's not designed to be used you shouldn't be surprised when it's behaves in a non-ideal fashion. Notifications and auto-update can be disabled.

That's completely unacceptable - the idea that I need to keep a background app running at all times just so I can play a game once or twice a month. Imagine if all apps took such an arrogant approach; our machines would barely run under the weight of the cruft. I similarly avoid Intel installers when using their drivers because they also like to install and keep running a half dozen services and widgets. Same thing with iTunes - I use a shell script to start it up so it can start up all the extra services and kill them later after iTunes exits.

There's a lot of entitled software out there that arrogantly assumes sovereignty over your machine. I don't accept it.

Steam performance seems to very inconsistent.

It often runs like a dog on my Core2Quad but is usually butter smooth on my P4 laptop.

Right Click on a game -> Properties -> Set Boot Options -> "-novid"

For all my Source games: "-novid -w 1920 -h 1080 -window -noborder"

As far as I know, it uses Webkit for the entire UI--and possibly a rather old version of it.

Yes, that is true to an extent. For the web portions of the UI like the Steam store, it uses the Chromium Embedded Framework: http://code.google.com/p/chromiumembedded/

Steam itself works great; the only time I see problems with it is when the flashplayer plugin is involved.

They desperately need to drop their reliance on flash.

Once they do that, I think it would vastly improve.

Agreed, I nuked the flash player on all my osx/linux/windows machines (chrome deals with that decently enough) and now I can't view videos in steam.

Parts of it are served from the internets.

Steam works beautifully under Wine on my Ubuntu laptop (A Thinkpad T420).

I've never ran Steam under Wine but I have played quite a few games with varying degrees of success. My question is since Steam runs beautifully for you under Wine, does that translate into the games themselves running beautifully as well or is it still hit and miss?

Purely depends on the game. A good guess is that as long as the game runs on DirectX 9, it should run reasonably well. That should be most games, except for some of the more recent ones.

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