topic Timer Resolution in Desktop (Windows)

Timer Resolution

Astrion — Mon, 29 Jan 2018 23:37:39 GMT

Is there a reason why Spotify overrides the default system timer resolution of 15.6ms and requests a 1ms timer? This seems pretty excessive for any reasonable use case and is going to be a battery hog.

Running 'powercfg.exe /energy' yields this in the report:

Platform Timer Resolution:Outstanding Timer Request

A program or service has requested a timer resolution smaller than the platform maximum timer resolution.

Requested Period	10000
Requesting Process ID	4236
Requesting Process Path	\Device\HarddiskVolume4\Program Files\WindowsApps\SpotifyAB.SpotifyMusic_1.72.117.0_x86__zpdnekdrzrea0\Spotify.exe

This is without Spotify playing, btw, it's just loaded. Windows 10 build 16299.

Those of us on battery power would appreciate it if someone could take a look 🙂

Re: Timer Resolution

djkanoko — Mon, 16 Apr 2018 18:42:54 GMT

I noticed this issue happening with the Web Player version of Spotify on Firefox versions 54-56 as well. There is no reason that Spotify needs that level of granularity for audio processing. The default 15.6ms is more than enough to properly buffer and playback audio.

Re: Timer Resolution

Astrion — Thu, 02 Jul 2020 10:36:13 GMT

This is still an issue with Spotify today. Here's a relevant blog post about this class of problem: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/windows-timer-resolution-megawatts-wasted/

It's just poor programming, and there's no excuse for wasting battery power for those of us using laptops.

Some context from https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/timeapi/nf-timeapi-timebeginperiod:

This function affects a global Windows setting. Windows uses the lowest value (that is, highest resolution) requested by any process. Setting a higher resolution can improve the accuracy of time-out intervals in wait functions. However, it can also reduce overall system performance, because the thread scheduler switches tasks more often. High resolutions can also prevent the CPU power management system from entering power-saving modes. Setting a higher resolution does not improve the accuracy of the high-resolution performance counter.