Steam Forum

On Crossover 6.2.0, Mac, it seems that about 9 times out of 10, steam stalls for a very long time on "connecting steam account: <username>", and maxes out the cpu. If left for a while (10 - 15+ minutes?) it usually works, but leaves the CPU maxed out while the application is seemingly idle.

Is this related to the survey issue? I was not able to find where to enable/disable surveys.

I have this exact same problem. Anyone know of a solution?

I'm also having this issue .. it does eventually start, but it takes a very long time (5-10 minutes at least). Once it does start, it seems to run relatively well (though my subjective opinion would say that it's running worse than in 6.1.0).

I'm getting this too. I'm on a macbook pro [15.4" , 2.33GHz] running tiger with the latest updates [10.4.10].

Thanks,
Gary

Ken has replied in various threads on this topic so I'll quote him here so he doesn't have to repeat himself. 😉

Ken Thomases wrote:

The slow launch times of Steam and some games is an area of
continued focus for us. We definitely want it to be faster. Some
aspects of the design of Wine don't mesh well with the performance
characteristics of certain operations in Mac OS X. For example,
Wine makes use of lots of interprocess communication (IPC) using a
facility called Unix-domain sockets (these are different than
network sockets). This is not an area that Apple has spent any
effort to optimize. There's also a system call that can improve the
performance of certain IPC operations, but the implementation on
Tiger has fatal bugs which prevent us from using it. With Leopard,
CrossOver will be able to take advantage of this system call.

Ken Thomases wrote:

Well, it's a known issue that Steam launch and game launch times are
quite long under CrossOver Mac. It's something we've investigated,
but we have not yet found the cause. To some degree it's due to
slow system calls and interprocess communication (IPC) on the Mac.
Leopard fixed a certain bug which allowed us to take advantage of a
faster IPC mechanism, so this is improved somewhat with that OS.

That said, the delays should not amount to "several minutes", I
don't think. My only suggestion is to check the Energy Saver
settings on your MBP. If you're playing while plugged in (which I
would recommend), make sure your processor is set to run at full
speed and your hard drives are set to not spin down.

To summarize: They're aware of the slowness which is a combination of Steam, wine, and Tiger. They've tried several possible solutions to speed it up, but haven't been able to produce one stable enough to release. Leopard should see a performance boost in this area.

Larry, thanks for trying to save me the effort, but in this case it was a misfire. 😉

This problem is different than just general slow performance while loading Steam and some games. This is a bona fide bug on our part. Unfortunately, it's intermittent and seems to be happening much more often for some of our users then it does for us in testing. In other words, I have seen this happen, but only relatively rarely.

We still don't know why it's happening. Under the hood, what's happening is that the wineloader process for Steam is communicating with the wineserver process. For some reason, they are in a tight loop where one makes a request, the other responds, and then the request (or another like it) is immediately made again. There's apparently no real work happening here, they are just in a "What's mine say?" "Dude! What's mine say?" "Sweet! What's mine say?" ... screaming match. Eventually the do break out of the loop and then resume doing real work. It seems to be a timing thing.

It's on our radar, but due to the uncertainty, I can't promise when we'll have a fix. Hopefully, it will be fixed by the jump in Wine versions that will be part of our 7.0 release.