177MB app? Really?

[Göögöö]

Hi, I just installed Spotify through Microsoft Store, and I really feel like 177mb disk space for such a simple app is quite ridiculous.

Not that it would be much in absolute numbers nowadays, but it's just a huge footprint for a music player. I can imagine this reflects it's RAM usage, and it does use 190MB right off the bat.

This is an app that's used to stream music, not to make music. For example professional digital audio workstation Reaper uses 36MB of RAM when just launched.

I really don't get it, why does this app need such a large memory footprint. All it does is it downloads some encoded sound data from internet and translates it for feeding it to audio drivers. Could someone explain?

[davidcola]

Hi @Göögöö,

The reason the Spotify Application takes the storage that it does is probably because of all the features it has, such as shuffling, skipping, volume, downloading, favoriting, crossfading, queing, bluetooth connecting, repeating, and other settings. Spotify also has an Equalizer, which could take up some space as well.

Hope I answered your question! Leave a like if I did.

-davidcola

[Göögöö]

Dear @davidcola,

I appreciate your reply, but it's utterly not connected with the reality. Those features do not require Spotify to be 177mb. Oldschool Winamp does all of that in good 50mb and boasts the most trippy music visualizer of all time with a huge preset library in the packet. And, fx.ex. Kjaerhus Audio Classic Equalizer, now deprecated VST2-plugin, only takes a bit over 1mb of hd space.

This is why I don't believe that the feature set of Spotify actually justifies the memory footprint. As stated, there's a professional digital audio workstation software out there wth huge feature set that eats only a fraction of the memory Spotify does. I do understand that they're different kinds of apps that do different things, but still, makes me wonder.

[Programator2 · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Spotify is so big because it's built on Chromium Embedded Framework. That means it's essentially a web browser and user interface of Spotify is implemented using HTML5 and the web engine takes most of the space (instructions to parse and layout html page or run JavaScript).

The internal native code for downloading data and playback is much smaller.

I agree with you that it's a waste, but it's popular among developers because the user interface is easier to implement as a website and it's also portable between all platforms. It's bad that today's software is not focused on optimization.

[Göögöö]

Ahhh I see now. Very interesting, makes sense. I wonder if it's the same on
mobile and that's why it's so slow and jaggy.

Thanks!