Launching Steam freezes my system because of fossilize_replay taking whole memory

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
cpp, linux
Domain
operating-systems

Research direction

No source files or tests are named. Start by reproducing the launch on Debian 12 with the Steam client beta disabled and observe the five fossilize_replay processes and memory growth; done means identifying a reproducible cause and preventing the system freeze without requiring the beta client.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

System information

  • Steam installer version: 1.0.0.75 (I don't know for Steam client version but it's the current one)
  • Distribution: Debian 12 (bookworm)
  • Opted into Steam client beta?: No (opting in resolves the issue)
  • Have you checked for system updates?: Yes

Description of the issue

After I replaced my motherboard, CPU and RAM, launching Steam would freeze my computer within a minute.

It appeared that my 32 GB of RAM + 1 GB of swap were full. In fact, 5 process named fossilize_replay grew quickly until they filled my RAM. Their sizes were all equal.

I can avoid freezing my computer by killing the processes as soon as possible. Apparently they can pop again because once, I had to kill them twice. As Steam was still working, it allowed me to opt into beta, idea given by this salutary form prefilling, and this solved my issue. Only one of the five "fossilize_replay" grows, and it stops at 1.5 GB.

This started happening since I replaced 4 sticks of RAM (total of 12 GB) by only 1 stick. But I was already experiencing some lag with Steam client, so I suppose 1 module was entirely taken by that. Maybe a prerequisite to reproduce is to have only one module but I can't tell exactly.

Dominant language
C++
Stars
780
Forks
78
No merged PRs in 30d

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