Post #2987700

On two separate occasions I’ve had Steam on Linux get into a weird state where the compatibility layer that runs the Steam client itself infinitely spawns small processes until it eats up all the system memory and the kernel shuts it down or the desktop environment crashes. The first time it happened I was able to fix it by clearing Steam’s download caches, but this most recent time I went through a laundry list of attempted fixes until today I finally tried completely wiping Steam’s working directory with all of its configuration, caches, and supporting files, and that did the trick as Steam rebuilt all of that fresh on the next run. It felt like a bit of a nuclear option though, so if it happens again I need to experiment with individual configs or resources in that folder, but as far as solutions go it was very effective.