Steam-related issue: Steam webhelper hogging enormous amount of ram (2gb+) - Solution

I ran in to an issue using an ancient laptop at my parents. At some point, laptop started to dwindle down, game crashed, I noticed there started to pop out up to 40 instances of steam webhelper process in my taskmanager, them hogging over 50% of the ram available on the laptop, and 40-50% of the cpu power. After dwelling for some time with this issue, adjusting settings, modifying files, trying the webhelper permissions fix and everything failing, I decided to try and open the ingame overlay (shift+switch), noticed the web browser button on the toolbar and decided to check that out...

Behold, it started loading a browser with infinite amount of tabs on it, everything I had ever at any point clicked on the steam client pop ups, ads etc about new and upcoming games. These were the source of 40 different process instances, and 50% of ram hogged out, weirdly they started to load on the background only when a game was opened, and it was shut down when the game was closed. I'm not a coder but I'm pretty sure it is not meant to work like this, I had even cleared the web browser cache from the settings earlier, so this SHOULD had been cleared out already.

So, basically the web browser in it's current state seems broken. If you are having ram issues with steam client, do as I did: (Shift+switch while in game -> Web browser from toolbar -> close every tab)

I'm posting this here, because the problem occured only when I launched a game (Path of Exile in this case), and it went away as I shut down the game. It did not show up when just the steam client was running without games.

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Mad_Defibrilator wrote:

I had even cleared the web browser cache from the settings earlier, so this SHOULD had been cleared out already.

Deleting a browser’s cache won’t (and shouldn’t) close currently-open tabs; the two are completely separate things. If you’ve tested this in a regular browser and are seeing behaviour to the contrary, that would be a bug and you should inform its developer.