spotify helper process on Mac OSX 10.9.4

[permarco2002]

I have the latest version of Max OsX 10.9.4 and of Spotify. It happens sometimes that the NVIDIA graphic unit starts working heating up my MacBook Pro and when i monitor the active processes i see that there are many "Spotify helper" open and it says than one of the doesn't respond.

[Joe]

Hi. The issue is that the embedded Chromium used to render views doesn't respond to the operating system's polling for activity, so it just shows up in the Activity Monitor as 'Not Responding', but it should work just fine but I can see that the graphics card may get confused. Does killing the specific task fix it for you (spotify will restart it when it is needed)?

Spotify is aware that this happens and it will be fixed in a future release.

[permarco2002]

If I try to kill the specific task (the spotify helper one) it re-opens after 5 seconds... I also tried to reinstall the app but didn't work. Hope they solve this problem 😉

[Merik]

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@permarco2002 wrote:

If I try to kill the specific task (the spotify helper one) it re-opens after 5 seconds... I also tried to reinstall the app but didn't work. Hope they solve this problem 😉

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@permarco2002 Don't worry about it! It's totallty fine! 🙂 I'm running a Mac and also have the same thing! Although, I'm not too sure about Spotify making your Mac heat up...hmm...

[thepen]

This post from another forum speaks to the part about graphics card acceleration. It can be changed in User Interface preference settings. Hope that helps!

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Help-Desktop-Linux-Mac-and/7-Spotify-Web-Helpers-Running-Simultaneo...

olejon

Garage Band

Posts: 284

Registered: ‎24-03-2012

 

Re: 7 Spotify Web Helpers Running Simultaneously

 [ Edited ]

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‎28-09-2013 12:12 PM - edited ‎28-09-2013 12:14 PM

This is actually a good thing. From the release notes of v 0.9.4:

CEF 1 was "single process" and if it got stuck doing something - the whole application would "suffer." CEF 3 is a "multi process" version - this means it can do more things at the same time, and if any single thing that it is doing slows down, the rest of the application can continue normally. CEF 3 also allows us to use hardware acceleration on graphics cards - like the latest browsers, it basically uses the computer's hardware both smarter and faster. Users should see much smoother performance in areas that are graphics intensive, like scrolling through long lists.

Most modern applications work this way, to not block or slow down the UI process while working. Take a look at the number of processes Google Chrome uses, for example. This allows one tab to crash without taking down the entire application, and allows the UI to be responsive even though a tab is using a lot of CPU. So you shouldn't think that more processes means a bad application. It just means taking advantage of your hardware to give you the best possible experience.

[thepen]

This is actually a good thing. From the release notes of v 0.9.4:

CEF 1 was "single process" and if it got stuck doing something - the whole application would "suffer." CEF 3 is a "multi process" version - this means it can do more things at the same time, and if any single thing that it is doing slows down, the rest of the application can continue normally. CEF 3 also allows us to use hardware acceleration on graphics cards - like the latest browsers, it basically uses the computer's hardware both smarter and faster. Users should see much smoother performance in areas that are graphics intensive, like scrolling through long lists.

Most modern applications work this way, to not block or slow down the UI process while working. Take a look at the number of processes Google Chrome uses, for example. This allows one tab to crash without taking down the entire application, and allows the UI to be responsive even though a tab is using a lot of CPU. So you shouldn't think that more processes means a bad application. It just means taking advantage of your hardware to give you the best possible experience.