High CPU usage on desktop client

[fh19320]

Plan

Free

Country

Poland

Device

Skylake Desktop with iGPU

Operating System

Fedora Linux with KDE

My Question or Issue

I am evaluating Spotify Premium to be installed on multiple Linux desktops.

The issue I am facing is quite high CPU usage due to animated bars indicating that the song is playing. If I scroll down so it is not visible, the CPU goes down to 3-5%. Otherwise it oscillates at around 20% single core usage.

Note that this is very high and it's comparable with youtube playing video. Therefore when running in background and working with e.g. browser, it slows down the CPU considerably due to heavy context switching and load on two cores.

I think it would be not difficult to make this animation much slower, with changing it to 2x slower animation, and this would lower cpu usage by 8% on single core and it would be a lot. This could make every spotify fan PC faster, consuming less energy and be environment friendly, in these hard times.

I understand that the image on the UI is like a something special to hundreds of millions of people, and chaning is no easy, but as today Boris Johnson said, going green can be very easy for everyone.

[somnam]

I'm having the same issue. After minimizing the client the CPU usage drops from 30-25% to 8-9%.
Maybe there's some CSS hack to hide/disable the animated bars?

[fh19320]

I updated client to latest version and now I am facing serious 40% CPU usage for just spotify client.

[wouterla]

I have similar issues with the linux client. 

CPU usage is 20-40% when the client is displaying a window, 2-4% when in the background, though it does show short peaks to 35% even then.

I'm not even playing the music on the PC, the client is playing through spotify connect to my pioneer amplifier.

Is there any way to avoid this?

[HerrEurobeat]

100% CPU usage on my Thinkpad T430, makes the client nearly unusable because of the produced heat. 

OS: Arch Linux with i3

Kernel: 5.15.2-zen1-1-zen 

Spotify (installed via AUR): 1:1.1.72.439-1

[areisferreira]

Same issue here after upgrade to version1:1.1.72.439.

[Athantor]

Yep, same for me:  while playing (and only then) constant 100% usage of one cpu core. Reinstall +rm config and cache: no difference. 1.1.72.439 on Arch Linux.

Same problem here on windows and here on mac.

Good that Spotify doesn't charge us money for such high quality product... 😒

EDIT:

it seems that the problem has resolved itself, after few hours (~2021/11/19 21:00 UTC). Looks like it was connected with spotify's internal infrastructure problems.

Until next tests on prod dear friends! 🙃

[twats3n]

Linux Mint, Pro user, 200% CPU no matter window or play status.

This needs _someone_ to work on.

Also, nice reporting system ^^

[twats3n]

Spotify log output

[twats3n]

... funnily enough, this seems to be dependant on the playlists I play. Reproducible, "Video Game Soundtracks" does 200% CPU, "Retrowave / Outrun" has 2%

[Sebasty]

Hey @twats3n 

Is this still happening to you now? Asking because yesterday there was a problem affecting many users - Spotify apps were crashing or eating CPU time. The issue was resolved.

🙂

[somnam]

Hi again, in my case it's definitely the animated bars shown next to the "now playing" track.
When I'm on Album view with a track playing and the bars visible I get 25-50% CPU usage.
When switching to Artist view with only album covers the CPU usage drops to 8-10%.

I've managed to extract the UI components from a zip file in spotify installation folder and replace the animated bars gif with a static "play / pause" icon and the CPU usage on Album view dropped to 8-10%.

[fh19320]

The hack works brilliantly, I replaced it with Greta Thunberg thumbnail and it's perfect!
Everything works now much faster including browsing and using apps and most importantly, consuming much less precious power.

[bwelmers]

Same problem here, high CPU usage. Also another annoying bug that the window title is left blank or frozen on one particular song. I downgraded from
version 1.1.72.439.gc253025e (latest version in both Flatpak and Ubuntu Snap) back to 1.1.55.498.gf9a83c60 and got rid of all these problems.

[fh19320]

It's equaliser-animated-green.gif in xpui.spa which is plain zip file, so changing that *.spa file to *.zip, then unpacking, changing gif to static image and then packing it into zip again works. It's also easier just to enter it with midnight commander and then copy to the archive updated gif. It's easiest to do with flatpak package. With snap - maybe mount --bind the whole directory with the zip inside.

[amouiche]

Perfect and simple.

Free about 1 cpu power just by removing this useless animation.

Please Spotify, remove this animation. You will save lot's of Watts

[egge757]

I've noticed that with the latest release, although cpu consumption has dropped somewhat in recent releases, the power consumption still remains high.

Power consumption on Windows on the other hand remains low.  Not sure what's going on there.  The UI appears to be identical between the two products.

[f4ck0ff]

I get high CPU usage even when spotify is not playing and is minimized (Linux Mint).  Have just turned off options like "normalize volume" (etc) to see if that helps.  Maybe spotify is trying to do that job in the background even when no song is playing.

[spraitazz]

Same here (laptop with 64-bit Ubuntu 20.04.5 LTS, 8 cpu cores). Just listening to a song with the client minimised uses fully 2 cores.

[bigkrp]

Same on Fedora 40. Spotify client extremely greed.