Desktop: Persistent Lag Across the Client

[JuStScotty]

Plan

Premium

Country

United States

Device

Windows 10 Laptop, Windows 10 Virtual Environment, Bluestacks Pie 64, Samsung S23+

Operating System

Windows 10 22H2, Windows 10 21H2, Android 9 Pie, Android 13 Tiramisu (OS is respective of Device)

My Question or Issue

On both Windows 10 environments, I have experienced very consistently appearing lag when trying to interact with the media controls and volume. The actions that experience this issue are:

- Play

- Pause

- Seek Forward

- Seek Backward

- Clicking anywhere in the playback bar.

- Clicking anywhere in the volume bar, and the resulting volume adjustment.

- Clicking to start a new song in a different playlist.

- Having the music end after the app is closed using the X button. (Killing the Spotify task in Task Manager will end playback immediately.)

The time I wait for any of these actions ranges from 0.5 seconds to up to 20 seconds. I do not experience this issue at all on my S23+, and I also do not experience it in the virtual Android device that is built on the Windows 10 22H2 laptop.

On the laptop I tried completely reinstalling the app, including cleaning out all the registry files. I cleared cache, and tried both the Spotify provided installer and the Windows store versions. The virtual Windows 10 install was a clean build from the day before I installed and tested Spotify on it.

Edit: Forgot to add, for both the systems having issues and not having issues, I have used the app on:

- Dorm Ethernet

- Dorm Wifi

- Mobile Hotspot Wifi

- Mobile Hotspot USB Tether

- Starlink Home Internet

[Susan_GP]

Hi there @JuStScotty,

Thanks for posting in the Community and welcome.

First up, thanks for all the helpful info and for letting us know about what you've already tried to resolve the situation. 

So we can take a better look at the behavior you noticed, would you mind sending us a video recording of it? You can attach it in your next reply in mp4 format, or you can also upload it to YouTube or Google Drive and make it public, so we can visualize it.

On another note, have you tried enabling/disabling hardware acceleration from the app's settings to check if that makes a difference?

Lastly, let us know if it also happens when using Spotify from the Web Player on those devices. 

We'll keep an eye out for your reply.

[JuStScotty]

Hello, after a short bit of testing today, it seems like hardware acceleration is a major culprit for these issues. It also appears that they seem to start off bad at the beginning, improve rapidly, and based on previous anecdotes, get worse over time with both hardware accel. and non-hardware accel. Would you be able to explain why this is the case? I would think that since my machine is decently specced, it would be able to hold up the process better than it appears to, given my phone runs it better. Is this an optimization issue?

Storage and Processing Specs for Reference:

AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX

RTX 3070 Mobile Variant

WD Black SN850X 4TB M.2 SSD

[Ivelina]

Appreciate the cooperation @JuStScotty. So we can get a better understanding of the situation, we'll need some more details and to do some testing.

Could you check the permissions of the video that you uploaded? Unfortunately we're not able to view it and you may have to re-upload it as an unlisted YouTube video. 

Did you get the chance to test with the Web Player and does Spotify behave differently there?

As far as we understand, you experience the lag both with the app version downloaded from our website, as well as with the one from the Microsoft Store. Is this the case?

Lastly, would it be possible to log into a family member's or a friend's Spotify-account in order to check if the same thing happens on another account?

We'll be on the lookout 🙂

[JuStScotty]

The video is already unlisted, and I was able to view it from an incognito tab with no issues. Not sure why you are unable to view it as is, but I have made it public.

After trying out the web player, it does not appear to experience the same issues as the app, even when Hardware Acceleration is enabled for my browser (Opera GX).

Yes, the official Spotify website download for the app and the Microsoft Store version behave similarly.

There is no significant change when going between my account and a friend's account.

The only thing that seems to make a different in the app is whether Hardware Acceleration is on or off, and this again does not carry over to the web browser version with HA enabled on it.

[Joan]

Hi @JuStScotty,

Thanks for the reply. We were able to open the video and examine it this time. Could you please try the following:

• Make a brand new account for test purposes and log in with it on the affected device. Does the issue persist?
• Log in with your account on a completely different Windows device (not a virtual machine). Do you experience any issues there?

This will help us narrow down the root cause. 

Let us know how it goes.

[JuStScotty]

Alternate Account Test

- Not a new new account, but one from a long time ago with the free tier and four playlists with about 50 songs total.

- Even under load with a game running and two browser instances, plus hardware acceleration turned on, there are no issues.

- Note about the game, it is a lot more GPU bound than my normal game, but my normal can't be left open in the background as it is multiplayer.

Different Windows Device

- On a separate machine containing an i7-7700 and a Gt730, and not much software beyond a normal Windows install.

- Some jitter and a bit of delay with HW accel on, but not nearly as bad.

Back on Main Device and Account

- During this testing I also went back to main dev and account, issues aren't as bad as before. Similar to other test computer.

So a rather frustrating lack of sufficient information, my best guess now would be that it's some process in the pipeline that's filling up over time and getting stuck. Maybe one that's involved during Hardware Accel specifically? I may also be misunderstanding, is Hardware Accel the usage of the GPU to create the images of the app more quickly? And would that also affect the GUI interacting with my inputs?

[Joan · Accepted solution]

Hi @JuStScotty,

Thanks for the detailed reply. 

Hardware Acceleration is basically using the computer's GPU to render the images in the app faster, so in a way yes, if you are doing any other GPU intensive tasks at the same time, this can cause performance issues. Judging from the fact that a different account doesn't show any issues even with the setting turned on, most likely it's some issue related to your main account. 

If you have a relatively large library there, rendering all these elements might explain why hardware acceleration can cause stuttering. While the app can handle a lot of elements, the more stuff you have, the more the performance is likely to degrade. If this is the case, consider downsizing the library to reduce the load. 

You can also always just leave hardware acceleration off if you have noticed that doing so allows for better performance.

Hope this helps.

[JuStScotty]

Thanks for the informative response, though this leaves me with a couple further questions.

- Why is non-HA so much faster, if the CPU would be responsible for both rendering and providing functionality for the app?

- Shouldn't only what's on screen be rendered? Why would every playlist get rendered every time?

- Why would my main account, with all of the elements present, not function much worse on the computer with the notably worse GPU (2.2k% difference on UserBenchmark) ?

Edit: Also, if I accept an answer as a solution will the thread get locked? My initial issue has been solved, and now I'm mostly just curious about how stuff works.

[Joan]

Hi @JuStScotty,

Thanks for the reply. There are many factors that contribute to these types of things and it's impossible to say for sure where the behaviour stems from. For example, we know that hardware acceleration has a checksum offloading feature and this can cause issues if the app data gets corrupted. 

If hardware acceleration is causing issues on your end, then we advise against having it on. If you encounter any more particular account or device issues, we're here to assist.

Hope this clears things up.

[JuStScotty]

Hello,

After a month and a bit of using the Spotify app with hardware acceleration disabled, I am still experiencing bursts of massive delay when interacting with the media control elements of the app (play/pause, skip song, volume slider, clicking play on a different song).

This lag in response time will also occasionally still happen when closing the app, with music continuing to play for up to nearly 15 seconds or until the process is killed in Task Manager. These issues do not seem to appear when navigating the GUI outside of standard loading times for large amounts of elements in searches and other playlists (titles, albums, album covers, etc).

These problems will happen regardless of heavy load (playing a game such as Valorant) or light load (using a web browser that has it's CPU and Memory usage forcibly limited) on the system. The only relevant changes since the previous post has been an operating system upgrade to Windows 11 and any updates that the Spotify app has received.

My incredibly uneducated guess for the problem would be a process in the Spotify app that is hanging and causing a delayed reaction to any interaction with the media player. Is this possible, and if so would there be any changes that I could make to fix it?

[JuStScotty]

One big thing I noticed just now when I had a bunch of inputs that just weren't going, enabling offline mode made them all happen almost instantly. This seems to imply that the problem is related to something with information moving around in the background over the internet. I don't think it would be the internet connection itself since I live in a dorm with industrial grade fiber, and the Android version does not have these issues when I am on that network.

[Joan · Accepted solution]

Hi @JuStScotty,

Thanks for all the info. Due to the inconsistent nature of the issue and because it seems isolated to your setup, we've been unable to repro this on our end and find any conclusive answers. We'll happily pass all this information onto the appropriate team so that they can investigate further. Be advised however that we cannot say for certain at the moment when or if this is going to get addressed.

Thank you for your cooperation.

[JuStScotty]

I appreciate all the work you and everyone else on the team has put in to try and solve this issue. I know how weird tech can get, and I can still rely on the offline workaround if this is an unfixable issues. I would love to be able to hear about what gets figured out, if anything, but I understand that you're probably not legally or logistically able to do that.

Best of days to you and everyone else on the team!

[Joan]

Hi @JuStScotty,

We've continued our research and found one more possible solution. Could you please try tweaking your device's DNS settings as follows:

1. Open the Start menu and click the gear icon to open the Settings app.
2. Choose Network & Internet from the list, and click Change Adapter Options.
3. Right-click the network you’re using, and choose Properties.
4. Find Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4) in the respective list, and double-click it.
5. Choose the Use the following IP address or Use the following DNS server addresses, and add the desired values (can be obtained from your ISP or use a public DNS server like Google DNS (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4).
6. Click OK to save all the changes, and close the Properties window.

Fingers crossed that this is the key to solving the issue.

Let us know how it goes.

[JuStScotty]

Hello Joan,

I made the change of "Use the following DNS server addresses" from automatic to the Google DNS addresses (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4).

After using for ~15 minutes and jumping around various playlists, the media player elements seem to be slightly more jittery but generally much more responsive. For example: after moving the volume slider to a new spot, it will jump back to it's previous position and then return to the current one both visually and audibly. This is similar to what was happening before, but it will now be over the course of half a second to a full second instead of ten seconds or longer as it was previously. Additionally, music seems to now stop playing as soon as I click the X to close the app. I will run my machine in this state for at least several days to see if this behavior is consistent.

To make sure I understand what changed, is there a problem where changes in DNS would cause the Spotify client to de-sync with the server for long periods of time?

The continued support is much appreciated!

[JuStScotty]

Hello again,

After several days of testing with the DNS solution provided, here are some notes on observations that I had. All were on the same network with hardware acceleration disabled and with a variety of load levels.

• The app is generally a bit more responsive after initially being opened..
  • Instead of being largely delayed, the volume slider would jump between the new and previous position after being moved.
  • Seems like it gets slower the longer it is open, regardless of active use. Clearing the cache seemed to momentarily fix it, but I'm unsure if those are directly connected as it slowed again long before the cache filled back up.
    • Issues appear to be intermittent. During a download I had an input respond instantly and it was immediately followed by one that took ~10 seconds.
  • When closing the app after at least a short amount of time of concurrent listening, playback would take a shorter amount of time to stop, but it would generally not be instantaneous.
  • After being open but idle for about half an hour, it took ~15 seconds between clicking play and playback starting. There did not seem to be anything visually happening, so doesn't seem to be the loading in the GUI or song indexing that would be hanging playback.
  • Apparently it affects the entire UI. When I went from offline back to online, clicking "Add A Source" under the local music menu also had a delay of ~10 seconds before the dialogue box popped up.
• Playback would frequently stall at the end of a song. Pressing the skip to next button would go forward two songs, seeming to imply that the end of the song that stalled prompted going to the next, but for some reason that input was not being handled until prompted by another being queued.
• Amount of downloaded songs seems to make no difference, nor does having songs downloading as music is playing.
  • No noticeable difference when switching stream quality between Low and Ultra High.
• Not sure if I specifically noted this previously, but none of these issues exist in offline mode. Download quality is set to Ultra High.
• Seems to take a while to load album art and such when lag is already present. Unsure if this is related.

[Vasil]

Hey @JuStScotty,

Thank you so much for the thorough updates!
We've passed them down backstage and we'll let you know as soon as we have any new info 🙂
Stay tuned!