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Comment by Fogest | Hacker News Reader

The huge amount of data steam used on the store that people are pointing out in the reddit comments makes me wonder if this is why I am having so many problems on their store. For the last half year or so I have found that Steam store pages load very slow for me. It feels like I am loading in their pages on dial-up. I have been suspecting it could be my ISP throttling the Steam connection, but no other download/streaming service or anything seems to have this same problem. And going on a VPN or different browser doesn't resolve the problem.

I wonder if the issue is simply that it is loading a ton of data and my connection just isn't fast enough. Time to monitor the network traffic while browsing Steam I guess.

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Not to beat on frontend but I vaguely remember that the UI was rebuilt with React a couple of years back and the other day while browsing a sale, specifically hovering over Final Fantasy XIII would crash an entire sales widget, printing out a React error. I wonder if this is just a case of framework bloat getting out of hand (again)

People give React far too much credit.

Source: I've had the privilege to ask questions to some of the engineers on that team...

It could be, or maybe poorly optimized assets? I always have such a problem loading the pictures and videos associated with each game.

I've used other sites that are fully React based that run quite well and don't have these issues. So I can't imagine it is specifically the frameworks fault.

But I do find if developers use these big frameworks and don't use them properly, the slowdowns can be much more pronounced.

The new Steam UI was incredibly bloated at the start, it was frequent (in my experience) for it to force close because it wouldn't fit in RAM along with the active game. It got better, but I'm still not loving it.

Maybe I'm prejudiced to React and its variants, because I have never used a React app I liked, just React apps that are useful despite their shortcomings.

React is so wildly popular that you probably have a bunch of websites and apps you like that use it but because it’s so wildly popular there are also extensive examples of poorly made applications.

Ding ding ding! It's possible (easy) to make terrible software in any framework/system. The popular systems are almost certainly going to have the most offenders, the worst offenses.

(It makes me nuts but) I seriously think the web is basically the greatest. And we have some pretty good tools for doing pretty good, that we can use, if we try hard. But also, the whole middle-tier data-architecture is made up by almost everyone, with little guidance; there's incredibly little guidance & views of how we effectively get data to the client and cache & update it effectively.

The tools and tech exist, but instead of clear industrial practices everyone's stringing shit together.

I also think that stringing shit together is often very much okay.

Your user or customer wants their problem solved or their desirable experience delivered. They often don’t care if there are bugs or jank or slowness as long as they get what they want.

Customers almost always want to not deal with bugs, jank and slowness. It wastes time and attention, which is much worse than wasting compute.

Minor issues are usually tolerable, especially when there aren't any alternatives. That doesn't mean there's no cost.

I agree, but it’s usually not an “all else equal” situation when it comes to alternative products.

Customers would rather play a buggy/janky game like the Elder Scrolls series, Minecraft (especially early in its lifespan, not really so much anymore), or Ark (the dinosaur game) than play a polished bug-free game with boring gameplay.

Or as another example, customers would rather deal with the ugly UI and slow UI performance of Autodesk Fusion than use a more polished/native feeling application that isn’t as powerful for design work.

Games are a completely different type of application. They're not utilitarian, they aren't automatically better when they behave predictably. The launcher, the menus, the game engine are fairly traditional but the game mechanics code has completely different desirable properties.

> It's possible (easy) to make terrible software in any framework/system.

It's always possible but not always easy. Some frameworks can and do choose to make certain kinds of errors hard to make, even at the cost of asking more from the programmer. It's a fallacy to think that they're all the same.

I wonder wtf is in the 200+ megabyte installer that has to download every other day if not the data the store needs...

Downloading the same browser engine that everyone else uses too time and time again as more bugs and security issues are found in it...

Wait, when is this occuring? I don't recall any installer downloading every other day. Is this something from maybe being on the beta branch of Steam or something? Or am I just missing this?

Feels like every time I open Steam I'm waiting for the latest version to unpack...

Oh, that's odd. But I also have Steam launch at startup so maybe it's doing something in the background before I open it. I don't think I've really ever seen this unpacking thing unless I maybe am installing a Steam client update periodically

Sounds like you're using the Steam Beta Client, which does update very often. Maybe switching back to the stable branch would be better suited for you.

I'm not on the beta client. It still gets updates every few days.

I launch it almost daily. Last Steam (on Linux) proper update was weeks ago. I think a new version of Proton was released like a week ago, though.

It's not a frequent occurrence, unless I have too many games installed, but then those are the downloaded games updating stuff, not Steam. Uninstall the ones you're not going to play in a while if that's becoming a problem.

You can also turn off auto-updates for specific games

That's a glitch i faced on my previous pc and fixed it by fully uninstalling.

Steam redownloads the client when it shuts down "dirty" to fix itself, but to me it was happening basically every time.

Try the steam website and see if you have the same problem?

The funny thing is that it actually works fine for me on their mobile app, which is the same app this post talks about with the poor data usage.

It just seems to be on my PC. It's only on the store. Even download speeds seem okay. But regardless of whether I use the client, Brave, Chrome, Firefox, Edge, they all are slow for the store page. Even things like the community pages and workshop all load fine. It makes zero sense to me why things like pictures/videos in their store load insanely slow for me, yet the images in things like the workshop have zero problem.

I've been trying to figure out what is wrong for quite some time and haven't figured out what could be causing it.

Have you moved to a different locality since you've had a steam account?

Steam -> Settings -> Download -> Region

Negative, and it's funny because my download speed seems fine in Steam. It's only the store specifically that is slow.

I'm assuming you've already looked into F12 › Network tab? No requests getting stuck on DNS resolution of some weird CDN or anything like that?

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