Whenever Steam is installing something (be it an update or a new game) it basically throttles every other process running on my system to the point of being unusable - the actual DE/windowing systems seem to run fine without any noticeable performance drops (I’m on GNOME/Wayland), however it seems like Steam basically takes priority over all other background processes (eg. I can open Firefox and control the window as normal, but it refuses to actually load any pages until the install is finished - even Steam’s own tabs like the store take an eon to load and aren’t responsive).
I’ve tried searching, but can’t find any other reports of similar issues (related keywords just get grouped into “my downloads should be faster” - I have my download speed capped to 10MB/s in Steam so that it doesn’t fully consume my network bandwidth, and that works just fine). I also haven’t found anything else that exhibits this behaviour (within Steam or other applications), even tasks that should be fairly heavy (i.e. compiling large codebases, installing software through other means, etc) allow me to multitask in the background without issue.
It doesn’t look like my CPU threads are maxed (or even all doing work), so I can only think that Steam is consuming the entirety of my disk I/O bandwidth and thus preventing any other processes from performing disk operations. Would there be an easy way to verify this/some way of limiting Steam’s disk access?
Would appreciate any ideas as I really don’t even know where to start with this.
HDD you mean mechanical drive? If the drives are form you log /dev/sdc and /dev/sdd then, yes steam will be slow as hell, changing, updating, installing games, also loading of the game will be slow. Steam install games in /home/user…
Change steam library to SSD/nvme and see how it goes.
Yeah, HDD = hard disk. The issue is not that it takes a long time to install games, but rather it prevents other unrelated process from running while it is installing something (including processes installed on the SSD, although they probably would be accessing /home at various points). I had previously been running Windows 11 on this same system (also installing games on the HDD) and had no problems with multitasking while installs were running in the background.
I also don’t imagine I am the only person to install games on a second HDD as SSD’s tend to have limited space (mine is 1/5th the size), yet I haven’t been able to find anyone else running into this issue.
There can be many things, steam, something in the system, filesystem. Try first to install a game on SSD and see what will happen. You can look system logs at the same time in console type
journalctl -f