Spotify has always had a few kinks in it, but the benefits way overwhelm the negatives so I generally ignore the problems and move along. Recently, though, I am experiencing a problem that is more serious in nature.
On two occasions recently, I have come to wake my machine and gotten a notice that the machine was out of memory. OSX handles this pretty elegantly and puts running tasks into a paused state to keep the machine from hanging. The first time this happened, I chalked it up to bad luck and went through and shut down all the open tasks, rebooted the machine and went about my day. When it happened again, I went looking for the culprit.
The next time, "Top" sorted by memory usage showed the main kernal task holding about 12G of RAM. Next in the pecking order was spotify with 2G. Both of these are astounding numbers. After spotify, the numbers for RAM dropped to normal. I went ahead and killed spotify and immediately the kernal task shed more than 10G down to under 2G used; obviously spotify and its 2G were gone, so total RAM usage dropped 12G simply by killing spotify! Total RAM usage was now under 6G; normal. Found the culprit pretty easily; spotify.
I don't know what is happening here, but spotify is broken. I am running this on OSX. One of the things that I always notice, but ignore, is that spotify, even when in the background, uses a disproportionate amount of CPU. I use geek tool and it displays the results of a top session on my desktop so I see activitiy and spotify routinely shows between 10 and 25% CPU... doing nothing, without even the screen displayed. Something is wrong here. Could that activity also have a slow memory leak?
I can ignore the CPU usage, the machine is reasonably powerful so the impact is limited, but gobbling up the RAM would be a "cancel the subscription" event if OSX wasn't as well behaved as it is in managing this. I use this machine for work. If the memory problems actually caused the machine to hang and me to lose work then the choice between feeding my family and streaming music would be an easy one!
I am happy to help troubleshoot if someone at spotify has an interest. Just an FYI, fired spotify back up; memory is not climbing yet, but CPU is over 100% for that thread and has been for 20 minutes. There is no discernable activity occurring; no streaming, no downloading, just burning cycles like crazy. This program is broken.
Staff / Moderator/ 2 years ago in Social & Random