Spotify for Windows writes excessive amounts of data to the SSD/disk

[freedomsprogress]

Plan

Premium

Country

Australia

Device

Windows desktop computer

12-generation Intel 12400F

Samsung NVME SSD

Operating System

Windows 11 23H2

App version

Spotify for Windows (64 bit)
1.2.65.255.g85e641b4

My Question or Issue

After 8 hours of use, Spotify has written over 30GB of data to my SSD (according to Sysinternals Process Monitor, which is considered an accurate system monitoring tool and can be downloaded from Microsoft's website).

However, my cache file is only 4502MB, or just over 4.5GB in size.

I only listen to music and don't watch music videos.

Whenever I search for new music or browse playlists - and to a lesser extent, while playing music - I've noticed that Process Monitor records Spotify writing several megabytes of data per second. Leaving Spotify running the background playing either one of my playlists or a playlist by another user results in gigabytes of data being written to the SSD.

I'd like an explanation from the Spotify technical team as to why I/O write bytes are so high. Happy to provide technical logs from Sysinternals Process Monitor.

Despite playing my music at Spotify's highest quality setting, we know that their tracks on the desktop app are available to play in the Ogg format at 320kbps

This issue has been reported as far back as 2016

My app settings

Streaming and download quality: Very high

Auto adjust audio quality: deactivated

Normalise volume: Activated and set to Normal volume level

Show local files: deactivated

Publish new playlists on my profile: activated

Start a private session: deactivated

Share my listening activity on Spotify: activated

Show my recently played artists on my public profile: activated

Show my follower and following lists on my public profile: activated

Crossfade songs: activated and set to 10 seconds

Automix: activated

Mono audio: deactivated

Equaliser: set to flat preset

Open Spotify automatically after you log in to the computer: deactivated

Cache location: default

Proxy type: autodetect settings

Enable hardware acceleration: activated

[synzera]

Did you ever manage to fix the issue? I currently am having a similar problem.

[OscarDC]

Hey folks,

Thank you for your messages and sorry for the delayed response, it seems this one slid in a crack.

We appreciate all the information you've included in your posts. As other streaming apps, the Spotify desktop app may write temp files, log files, metadata (such as the album art) and others that may result in some disk usage, but it should be a small amount of data.

So to make sure we covered all the basics, check if your Spotify app is up to date as updates often include performance and efficiency improvements. We do also recommend clearing the app’s cache and logs to see if disk activity decreases. If the issue persists, if you installed the app from the official website, we'd recommend installing the version available in the Microsoft store (or vice versa) to see if it has the same behavior. 

Lastly @synzera, include in your next response the OS version of your device, along with the Spotify version you're currently running to continue investigating the case.

We'll be on the lookout. 

[synzera]

Hi Oscar,

Just wanted to update you on the troubleshooting I’ve done so far.

System details:

• OS: Windows 11 Pro, Version 24H2 (Build 26100.6584)

• Spotify version: 1.2.73.474.g7b30bb2b (Microsoft Store version)

What I’ve already tried:

• Cleared cache and logs, reinstalled Spotify multiple times (both website and Store versions).

• Fully reset Windows (deleted all files, clean reinstall).

• Booted in Safe Mode with Networking — same issue.

• Disabled IPv6 (switched to IPv4).

• Updated, reinstalled, and verified all audio drivers.

• Rebuilt WMI Repository via CMD 

• Disabled all MSI Center, Killer, and Nahimic services.

• Tested with a separate Spotify test account — same result.

• Verified that other apps and the Spotify Web Player work fine.

The issue persists: Spotify’s I/O write bytes climb rapidly until the app stops responding. It doesn’t seem to be related to drivers or services since it reproduces even in Safe Mode.

Thanks for your time,
Mishal Noman

[Ivelina]

Appreciate the details @synzera!

We've forwarded this backstage so it can be looked into, but unfortunately we can't give you an ETA for any news. As soon as there's any updates, we'll let you know in the thread.

In the meantime, don't hesitate to let us know if there's anything else we can help you with.

[MrSossenbinder]

It's pretty apparent Spotify has recently done a change which caused issues for quite a lot of people with the Windows Desktop App. I keep seeing this pop up on reddit and here as well.

I'm also affected by this. Spotify causes the disk it uses to store files to spike to 100% for minutes. I had a look at the issue with SysInternals ProcMon and noticed that Spotify looks like it tries to re-index everything constantly, over and over.

The usual advice is to clear caches / downloads, but the support fails to acknowledge that it's basically impossible to even do that as the app is just instantly stuck on startup, without even getting a chance to navigate to settings in the first place.

[Yordan]

Hey everyone,

Does the issue persist even on the latest version of the app (should be 1.2.79)? If you haven't updated yet, you can do so either via the in-app prompt or by manually performing a clean reinstall.

Should the behavior occur on that version as well, could you let us know if you're able to see where these Disk I/Os are writing to? You should be able to right-click a Spotify sub-folder and select "Properties" to view its "Size on disk". You can access these sub-folders in the app storage locations via the following paths:

Non-Store version:

C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Spotify

Microsoft Store version:

C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Packages\SpotifyAB.SpotifyMusic_zpdnekdrzrea0

Those paths contain a number of sub-folders, i.e. "Logs", "Data", etc. You can check which ones seem to be taking up disk space.

We'll also need some technical logs for Spotify. You can use one of the methods below to generate them:

Spoiler

Via in-app troubleshooting menu

1. Click the three-dots menu at the top left corner.
2. Select Help > Troubleshooting > Report issue.
3. Choose the appropriate type and press Report. This will generate a log file which you can then attach here in your reply.
   
   

Via command prompt

1. Make sure Spotify is closed and isn't running in the background.
2. Open Windows' Command Prompt as an administrator.
3. Enter one of the lines below, depending on where you installed Spotify from:
   
   Non-Store version:
   

   "%APPDATA%\Spotify\Spotify.exe" --log-file="%USERPROFILE%\Desktop\spotify.log"​

   
   Microsoft Store version:
   

   start Spotify.exe --log-file="%USERPROFILE%\Desktop\spotify.log"​

The above will launch Spotify and create a log file called spotify.log on your desktop. Now use the app as normal so that the behavior is recorded in the log file, then quit Spotify and share the log file here so we can forward it to our tech folks.

If you're unable to attach the file here in your reply, you can instead upload it to a Cloud service and share the URL - just make sure the file can be accessed by anyone with the link.

If there's anything else you think might be useful to the investigation (such as logs from Sysinternals Process Monitor or something similar), feel free to send it over as well. You can use Process Monitor's built-in File Summary tools (accessible through the application menu > Tools > File Summary) to get a breakdown of the files the app reads and writes to.

Cheers 🤘

[MrSossenbinder]

Hey Yordan, yes, I'm on 1.2.79.427.

Is there a way to drop the logs in private? I'm not sure what the logs contain and don't necessarily want to drop them in a public discussion. In my case, most writes go to the index.dat file in my spotify download folder. This seems to be the culprit which Spotify constantly writes to according to ProcMon

[Joan]

Hi @MrSossenbinder,

Thanks for the reply.

We understand the concern. Feel free to DM the logs to one of us Mods, it will greatly aid in our investigation.

Cheers!