Curious question just for having a better understanding:
Why do i experience a 3 to 6 minutes 100% disc usage impact on that HDD, which contains exclusively the HOME-Partition?
(Btw: No impact on that HDD containing the other system partitions.)
My ‘Mission Center’ reports that this impact is created via systemd/flatpak-portal/bwrap/pressure-vessel-adverb where the most active impact appears to come from ‘python3.9’ - and that is going for some time while listing in happy sequence nothing else or wine or Steam.
Originally i my main suspect had been the indexer (tracker), but the ‘Mission Center’ is always pointing on that 'pressure-vessel-adverb. So what is that one for by purpose and the temporary high disc usage on boot?
Me just curious and love to learn.
Having googled a bit more, i need to phrase my question a bit more precise: Should i have only one Steam Runtime environment or multiple?
This page described the pressure-vessel-adverb being the workaround on Steam’s workaround to enable steam containers on different Linux systems.
I find all of these in my Steam Library:
Steam Linux Runtime 1.0 (scout);
Steam Linux Runtime 2.0 (soldier);
Steam Linux Runtime 3.0 (sniper).
Which of these do i need indeed to run my multitude of games on Steam?
Would reducing the amount of Runtime environments help avoiding high disc usage on boot or is that behaviour not driven by the number of runtime environments but instead the number of games? (Note: Most games are on a mounted NVME, which is not affected by high disc usage on boot.)
This depends on your used games. Different games need different runtimes. But you can try to uninstall the scout runtime (oldest one) and soldier. It will tell you if it can’t get removed when it is needed by an installed game…
Steam is not involved at the start of your computer (unless you have set it to start automatically). There is absolutely zero activity from Steam at system start by default (if you have installed it via the openSUSE repos with standard settings). Steam starts first when you doubleclick the game starter or the main starter itself…
Btw, why do you have Steam installed via flatpak? If you install it via the standard openSUSE repos it it is way better integrated into your Leap system…(and you don’t have any high disk load due to some flatpak shenanigans…)
The flatpak works fine, and provides more current libraries than what Leap can offer. And doesn’t require the use of Packman to provide the codecs for some things that games want.
Got the disc usage on my home partition now down to a similar level as i have it with Windows 11.
On boot the disc usage is relatively limited for half a minute, but on click of Steam it is now about 1 minute for Steam to launch (plus a restart due to a steamwebhelper issue which happens to be there since about February) and further 2 minutes after Steam has fully launched. Not brilliant, but waaay better than before.
Notice that i use Steam via Flatpak for having latest Steam libraries. I also have the Packman and Open H.264 Codec repos active. That all provides for my gaming user the latest MESA and Codecs.
I found as mentioned above that i have three Steam Runtimes active. The tricky part was to determine which i actually needed for Leap 15.5 and which game. I went for a best guess shot-gun approach and it worked:
Installed via ‘ProtonUp-Qt’ the latest GE-Proton version. (As i write this, that is ‘GE-Proton9-5’.)
Clicked through the properties of all games and ensured that if Compatibility is active, it is now to that latest GE-Proton.
Use ‘ProtonUp-Qt’ for removing all older Proton versions so having left only Steam version 9, Experimental and that latest GE-Proton.
Restarted Steam and uninstalled in Library / Tools the Steam Runtimes Scout and Soldier aka left only the latest.
After System reboot, the performance got better as described above. Spot check on some games tells me that all is running fine, tested with:
Ready or Not, World War Z, Cities Skylines 1, The Forgotten City, Dishonored 2 and Assassin’s Creed Unity.
Summary: Having only latest Steam Runtime (Sniper) installed is fine with Leap 15.5.
If anybody has an idea of how to minimize Steam’s impressive disc usage any further, i really would appreciate your thoughts.