When steam is downloading it uses all my cpu

My friends say it's just me, but whenever Steam updates or downloads - which can take hours - it uses 99% of the CPU, makes everything else slow, and is itself glacial to respond at all. Does anyone else get this and have you ameliorated it somehow?

Even after the update and despite the download finishing six hours ago, Steam continues to run at 99% CPU. I had to exit Steam and restart it to get under 90% usage (now it's 2%). However this behavior is frequent enough that I see it as a problem I need to avoid from recurring. Right now, one of the other differences is that the VM size grew from ~15,000K to 84,116K and settled, whereas last time you saw it grew to 229,264K.

My machine has an AMD Athlon 64 3000+ CPU (not dual core), 2GB of RAM, an NVIDIA GeForce 7600-something and 500GB disk space.

Solution 1:

You can have steam check the filesystem (it uses a virtual filessystem in its caches) when you are logged in, I'd give that a go, and you can also make it defrag it now, those steam cache files get very very large and then the system can get overburdened trying to handle it and when you update it has to access it all over. And perhaps you need a bigger pagefile on your windows (or more RAM).

Solution 2:

You could also be infected with some sort of spyware or virus. I would run a scan before you spend hours defragging your hard drive.

Solution 3:

I've noticed this as well. It's really annoying when I'm trying to play a CPU-heavy game on my netbook. In my case, this was caused by the Flash animations on the steam home page in the Store tab on the client. It runs constantly, event when the Steam client is minimized to the system tray.

I tried disabling the Flash add-on in IE, but the Steam client doesn't respect that. In the end, I just click on "your account" in the Store tab every time I start the client. That page doesn't embed any Flash. Problem solved!