Did not have the Out of Memory Error but did have issues the other night which turned out to be shader cache, Loaded Steam then tried to play Halo 4, and was getting freezes, very low fps, and major mouse lag, i quit the game and shut down steam, then loaded "System Monitor" and saw 16 weird named running programs eating my ram up and loaded up the swap, it was at 4.6GB Ram and going up every 10 to 20 seconds, swap was at 1.2GB (i have swap set to 40GB) the highest i've ever seen swap go for me, normally only ever see a 200 to 300mb and thats only when i play Doom 2016 for a long time, So i worked out that these weird filename programs where to do with steams shader cache, so i rebooted, then loaded steam again and completely turned of steams shader cache (not just background as that was not on anyway) and so far i've had zero issues and played Halo 4 with no issues want so ever, so i am leaving shader cache turned off from now on.

Quoting: F.UltraAny one experience something similar? Starting today the Steam client started to die with:

 
***** OUT OF MEMORY! attempted allocation size: 1664312640 ****

Which is just 1.55GiB so should not be a problem, I have 16GiB free at the moment. And it keeps on dying with the exact same number each time.

First suspicion was that it was the background shader cache but as soon as I click on the disable button in settings steam dies again with the exact same error as it otherwise does after some time.

I also noticed that there are some crash dump being uploaded every time Steam dies:
 
nov 26 20:30:31 ubuntu crash_20201126203027_28.dmp[16688]: Finished uploading minidump (out-of-process): success = yes
nov 26 20:30:31 ubuntu crash_20201126203027_28.dmp[16688]: response: CrashID=bp-f5aea428-1efe-4056-9aad-964072201126
nov 26 20:30:31 ubuntu crash_20201126203027_28.dmp[16688]: file ''/tmp/dumps/crash_20201126203027_28.dmp'', upload yes: ''CrashID=bp-f5aea428-1efe-4056-9aad-964072201126''

Not sure if this is dumps sent to Ubuntu or to Valve though :), not familiar with the .dmp format either so no idea what's in them.

I have not had any problems. I just want to say that at first look this message sounded like it was calling your computer names and was censored - and I can't say I'm convinced that is not the case. "This ***** is out of memory" is too good of an error message to be accidental.

Quoting: eldaking

Quoting: F.UltraAny one experience something similar? Starting today the Steam client started to die with:

 
***** OUT OF MEMORY! attempted allocation size: 1664312640 ****

Which is just 1.55GiB so should not be a problem, I have 16GiB free at the moment. And it keeps on dying with the exact same number each time.

First suspicion was that it was the background shader cache but as soon as I click on the disable button in settings steam dies again with the exact same error as it otherwise does after some time.

I also noticed that there are some crash dump being uploaded every time Steam dies:
 
nov 26 20:30:31 ubuntu crash_20201126203027_28.dmp[16688]: Finished uploading minidump (out-of-process): success = yes
nov 26 20:30:31 ubuntu crash_20201126203027_28.dmp[16688]: response: CrashID=bp-f5aea428-1efe-4056-9aad-964072201126
nov 26 20:30:31 ubuntu crash_20201126203027_28.dmp[16688]: file ''/tmp/dumps/crash_20201126203027_28.dmp'', upload yes: ''CrashID=bp-f5aea428-1efe-4056-9aad-964072201126''

Not sure if this is dumps sent to Ubuntu or to Valve though :), not familiar with the .dmp format either so no idea what's in them.

I have not had any problems. I just want to say that at first look this message sounded like it was calling your computer names and was censored - and I can't say I'm convinced that is not the case. "This ***** is out of memory" is too good of an error message to be accidental.

:-D

Quoting: TheReaperUKDid not have the Out of Memory Error but did have issues the other night which turned out to be shader cache, Loaded Steam then tried to play Halo 4, and was getting freezes, very low fps, and major mouse lag, i quit the game and shut down steam, then loaded "System Monitor" and saw 16 weird named running programs eating my ram up and loaded up the swap, it was at 4.6GB Ram and going up every 10 to 20 seconds, swap was at 1.2GB (i have swap set to 40GB) the highest i've ever seen swap go for me, normally only ever see a 200 to 300mb and thats only when i play Doom 2016 for a long time, So i worked out that these weird filename programs where to do with steams shader cache, so i rebooted, then loaded steam again and completely turned of steams shader cache (not just background as that was not on anyway) and so far i've had zero issues and played Halo 4 with no issues want so ever, so i am leaving shader cache turned off from now on.

Well my problem is that as soon as I try to disable the shader caches Steam crashes, trying to find out if the setting exists in some config file somehwere that I can edit by hand.

So did the sane thing:
 
rm -rf ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/shadercache

And now Steam works just fine again!