Announcements
The Spotify Stars Program: Celebrating Values Week!

Help Wizard

Step 1

NEXT STEP

Spotify Helper process not responding

Spotify Helper process not responding

I have five Spotify Helper processes running in Activity Monitor and one of them is not responding. I've tried force quitting it multiple times, but it just keeps coming back. 

Reply
17 Replies

Does rebooting get rid of it?

No, it just keeps coming back.

 

If I force quit it enough times, it seems to stay away, but haven't left it long enough to be absolutely sure.

It's a known issue, not a real error, it is reporting a false poitive. There are a million tickets open on this. I wish spotify would act on these things, they haven't prevented duplicate songs on playlists which was requested by users in 2008! Sooo maybe in ten years they will fix that maybe not.

I'm having the same issue.

Screen Shot 2014-06-13 at 12.31.10.png

You should be able to safely kill the unresponsive instance. The desktop client launches another one anyway when it's needed, if it hasn't already done so.

Thanks for the advice but of course I did that already and it doesn't work. Same thing happening over and over, after I killed the unresponsive instance. 

Have you tried reinstalling spotify @greatfurt ?

Nope, not yet. Let me try it and then I'll let you know. Thanks.

I see this all the time. I didn't notice that there were several of these listed, but now that I look, I have five, one of which is Not Responding, just like cyclinghfpilot.

I I often open up Activity Monitor, and I see this most of the time, if not every time, when I have Spotify open. Spotify itself works fine, though. I wouldn't have guessed that anything was wrong if I wasn't in Activity Monitor so often.

The issue is that the embedded Chromium spotify uses 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. This should get fixed at some point, but it's not a real issue, just an issue of how it's displayed in the Activity Monitor.

 

Nothing to worry about guys 🙂

Well I wouldn't say that it is not a problem, I have seen my MacBook Pro with the refrigeration system full working only with spotify (It rarely happens using final cut, only when rendering) and if I look to activity monitor I can see how the spotify helper not responding is collapsing abouve the 50% of the total CPU capacity, IT IS AN ERROR, not an 'issue'.

I agree with galesberdurin.

I got really annoyed by this issue and tried switching several settings on/off in the spotify app. Disabling hardware acceleration seems to have done the job - previously Spotify Helper stopped responding nearly immediately after launching, whereas now it runs smoothly for hours. 

 

Anyone else with same result?

 

 

I'm sorry to say that, but this IS an issue. It slows down thw whole system. If you are using a Spotify app, such as musicXmatch, it gets even worse.

 

This is a huge bug and they must fix it soon!

I was having the same issue. Turning off hardware acceleration in preferences worked! I also set caching to automatic. No it starts and works faster!

While this thread was already bordering on old when you responded, I can confirm this actually does work on OS X. Disabling Hardware Acceleration, closing Spotify, and killing the Not Responding process in Acrivity Monitor fixed it. Upon restarting Spotify, no Helper crashed. It is a real issue apparently because now MusiXMatch does not super-heat my computer that should not at all be slowed down by Spotify when using it.

This is the "solution" to the issues it seems.


@Joe wrote:

The issue is that the embedded Chromium spotify uses 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. This should get fixed at some point, but it's not a real issue, just an issue of how it's displayed in the Activity Monitor.


 

Then here's the real question: Why is a Spotify UI rendering process running at all on my freshly restarted computer before I even open Spotify?

 

Edit: Sorry for posting in a dead topic, I should have checked the date. FWIW unticking "Allow Spotify to be started from the Web" seems to fix the issue of Spotify Helper processes running before you even open Spotify (Simply selecting "Don't open [Spotify] automatically" is not sufficient).

Suggested posts