Mac macOS extreme hard drive activity when running Spotify

[dduck]

Plan

Free

Country

Denmark

Device

iMac (late 2009)

Operating System

macOS 10.12.6

Spotify Desktop App 

1.0.88.353.g15c26ea1 

My Question or Issue

As soon as I log in to the desktop app the hard disk starts going bananas with activity. It's killing the perfomance of the computer and especially Spotify itself. I can't search or switch to browse/artist/playlist/etc, it just shows black screen with loading wheel spinning.

Playback perfomance of songs are working fine in most cases, but if nothing is in the queue I can't get to a page where i can add new songs.

Local files, hardware acceleration etc. is turned off and turning them on makes no difference.

[Loxer]

Hi there!

I know it sounds simple, but it's often overlooked. Could you try restarting your device? If that doesn't help, try a quick clean reinstall of the app. Just follow these steps. I'd recommend to try and disable Hardware Acceleration, just click on the Spotify Menu on the Menu Bar next to the Apple Menu, find Hardware Acceleration and next click on it to disable then confirm to restart Spotify.
Also, if you don't use local files try to disable them inside Settings.

If you're still having trouble, could you let me know the exact version of Spotify and the exact version of the operating system you're running?

I'll see what I can suggest next!

[dduck]

Deleting the cache and reinstalling the app did the trick. But one month down, with just moderate use, the cache has grown to a size where the app is slow again.

It's ridiculous one have to do a clean reinstall every month to have a functional app. 

[MattSuda]

There was recently a memory leak issue that could have also caused high hard drive activity (swap memory)

For updates on this issue, you can read about it here:

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Ongoing-Issues/Mac-Desktop-app-has-memory-leak/idi-p/4596624

Version 1.0.96.181 was just released and it should fix this memory leak issue. If you are still having trouble, please post your experience.

It will be rolling out, but you should be able to get it by downloading and installing from the Spotify website.