Spotify is agonisingly slow on desktop (windows 11)

[Yasmin14]

Windows 11

I've never had issues with spotify until recently, not even on Windows 11.

Recently I pulled all my liked songs into a playlist, and also added my local songs to the playlist. After a lot of troubleshooting to get my local songs to work, things were fine for a while.

Very quickly however, the desktop app began to become unusable. I would search in the playlist, and the search would take minutes to show up, IF it showed up at all. I would remove the search, and it would take equally as long to return to showing the full playlist, if it did at all. I'd hit play/pause, on the current song or a new song, or I'd hit the next/back button, and it would take ages to respond. I'd hit space to pause, and it'd still think I'm in the search bar and start matching with songs with spaces in them, even though the search bar was no longer clicked into.

When it took ages to respond I would close it to reopen it, which would result in spotify closing but not quitting properly because the app was hanging, requiring a force quit every single time.

I cleared the cache over and over and over, through the app and manually, and it only ever made a marginal difference in speed, while the other bugs (hanging and requiring force quits frequently, the search bug) remained. Restarts of the application or the device made no difference, this slowness was progressive and lingered no matter what.

Reinstalling was the one thing that made the biggest difference. It remained marginally slow at times but it was far more responsive in general and felt usable again. Unfortunately it's been about 3 weeks since my reinstall and it is once again slowing down in the exact same way, getting progressively worse. It is once again taking ages to respond to searches, play/pause/next/back button presses, or remove songs from playlists/liked songs. Reinstalling every time the appliance becomes slow is not a feasible option, especially given it slowed down after only about 3 weeks.

I have no problems on mobile, only desktop. If there's something I haven't tried I'm all ears because this seems like the application is coded in some fundamentally flawed way.

[chakibchemso]

this app has officially became garbage. old framework and poor code and no optimization whatsoever. for the amount of the money they have and given the relatively simple app this must be rebuilt. with a decent cross platform framework or even using native toolkits. they can afford that. end rant. thx.

[chakibchemso]

this is insane! 12th gen i5

[MatteoBomba50]

Plan

Premium

Country

Italy

Device

Desktop

Operating System

Windows 11

My Question or Issue

I've been getting low frame rates with the Spotify App when focusing on the App (I know it's a minor inconvenience but I do notice it when I switch between windows). I have tried doing a clean uninstall, but nothing has changed. I have an AMD Radeon RX6700XT installed on my pc.

[Herbmeiser]

Just a note if someone else has the same issue. So I tried to install Spotify from Microsoft Store but it lagged very hard on the home screen, scrolling just throttled my cpu and overall experience is very slow and unresponsive to use.

After that I downloaded it directly from Spotify.com and it's completely smooth.. The executable is different on the two versions as well. A bit weird so I would like to know what is the cause for that or has anyone had the same issue? I tried the same with Discord and it worked fine through both ways. For some reason Spotify is so much worse performance when downloaded from MS Store.

[#6]

I have been having this problem for over a month.
spotify sometimes lags.
What kind of lag is that there is a delay when playing a song, if you touch the volume bar, it is reflected about 5 seconds later, and there is the same delay when specifying the number of seconds in a song
I have tried every clean install and downgrade of spotify and it has not resolved the issue.
Specs are 13700kf, 3070ti, 32gb memory 1tb ssd.

[e-clect-eddy]

Spotify is slow since the last 2 updates for the desktop app on W10. It's as if the hardware acceleration is no longer working. If tried troubleshooting this with online suggestions but nothing made any difference. Spotify is just behaving very odd, MS Store starts (as a background process) whenever I start Spotify. Plus every few hours it auto-starts SpotifyWidgetProvider.exe which is not supported by Microsoft on W10, and I can't shut it off. I've tried every setting and it should not auto-start but it does.

[e-clect-eddy]

Today another update was pushed via MS Store, but none of the past 3 updates made any improvement. I've emptied cache countless times and ditto for switching Hardware acceleration on/off in settings. No effect. In APP settings in Windows 10 Home I did get a minor bug solved with the REPAIR option but the annoying overall sluggish navigation remains (maybe since the February 2025 Windows update) or around that time. Cause Spotify had an update as well a day later.

I do have an extended library, with more than 125 playlists, some have +4.000 songs. And +1,25Gb of cache for just Spotify in my Windows profile (say TreeSizeFree) but none of that cache can be cleaned (if that is the cause) > I suspect that will only be cleared once I uninstall the app completely? I have a old 3rd gen Intel process with 8Gb memory but until February that was not a problem, navigation was fine.

At first years ago I had the standalone / normal program on my PC but than was encourage (or switched over) to use the MS Store version. That one seems more buggy and has less options to toggle when troubleshooting.

PS will the MS Store version still get updates after Microsoft terminates support for W10? and the standalone version of Spotify?

[edckelly]

This worked a treat for me. I recommend this solution😁👍

[e-clect-eddy]

Today another update pushed on W10 for desktop app, still nothing improved.

I did notice that when Spotify is minimised that is hardly uses process power but as soon as it's full screen than it jumps to 10-38% plus it throttles to some kind of turbo mode at 3.4 Ghz when my 3th gen. process officially runs 3.2 Ghz max. that goes on until it's minimised. See red arrow the moment Spotify goes from minimised to full screen.

[e-clect-eddy]

I have this issue for many months and so far not a single update or suggestion has helped. I has the latest update 1.2.60 (on W10 Home) and after a bit of troubleshooting found that the performance is somewhat better but still very slow.

The settings page in the app takes about 15 seconds to open. sometimes it's 20-25 seconds. I found out that throttling the zoom function had some positive effect (see the image). But for unknown reason(s) it often reverts back to extreme slow overall navigation. Hope your tech-guys can find out what that is.

Navigating to the Spotify Home page in the app also causes the process to maintain a 10% permanent power consumption even if I don't touch anything. Minimising the app to the taskbar or the system tray brings power consumption down to about 1-3% with playback active. Maximising to full screen of the app and the processor momentary peaks around 3.5 GHz again above the acceptable limit of this 3.2 Ghz processor.

I have an i5 3th gen Intel processor 3.2 Ghz with 8 GB memory but sluggish Spotify causes it to peak 3.4 Ghz which is way above the acceptable limit of my processor. Default HP computer that works fine with everything accept Spotify since a few months, before that Spotify worked fine on my PC. No hardware changes made.

[#12]

This app once worked on my windows computer but at some point spotify became unresponsive to changes in song, volume, pause, pretty much every button had at least a 30 second delay. Additionally spotify is unable to load as it simply opens to a black screen with the three dots and close button, and does not load for 2+ minutes or becomes unresponsive and crashes. I've already uninstalled multiple times and restarted and turned off hardware acceleration.

[MarOnic]

I'll try my best to explain the issue I've been facing for a bit now:
Basically, when I open Spotify and play a song, it will only *sometimes* work. Sometimes it'll play the song like normal, and other times it won't play the song and my app will become really unresponsive. During this state, nothing on the app will load. I click on a playlist, an album, my profile, home page, anything: infinite loading screen. Sometimes the app will just freeze and stop responding too. I'm also unable to actually close the app during this state (even when it's not frozen) and I have to manually end the task via task manager. I've already tried clearing cache and uninstalling/reinstalling.

[Nugzo]

Yes same. Cpu Ryzen 5 3600.

[vtudor22]

Spotify is extremely slow to the point that it needs to be reloaded again and again and again.   I have a fairly good computer with a rather large amount of memory and there is no battery or app or optimization.  Not everybody uses a phone to listen to music.  It is rather inconvenient and problematic.   Thus all the above responses are not valid!

[Purposei]

Plan

Premium

Country

United States

Device

Windows PC, Processor: Intel Core i5-9400F

Operating System

Microsoft Windows 10 Home - Version 10.0.19045 Build 19045

My Question or Issue

Desktop Spotify is increasingly broken, and does not work most of the time, it takes about 2 minutes for a pause or unpause to work, when I force quit the application it takes a while to process and then fails and shutsdown, starting the application as an administrator results in a black screen for 10+ minutes and then it starts loading. I've done a fresh install process 3 different times in different modes, while restarting PC and clearing local data every time. The version of Spotify is the most recent version on the public install, I've tried the Microsoft Store version and the download from the website raw file as well, both have the same issue, this issue only starts after I log in with my account via Chrome connected login.

[VGL_Spud]

I'm also having a similar ongoing issue on Windows 11 AND my android phone. I've tried reinstalling, clearing cache and many other things but it just isn't solving the problem. The weird thing is, that my Spotify is working perfectly fine on the web, yet when it comes to the app it is SO slow at responding to almost everything and I have no idea why. The app does work fine for very brief moments and then all of a sudden it slows down massively again and its painfully, unusably slow.

[Ivelina]

Hey @VGL_Spud,

Thanks for posting in the thread!

Since you've mentioned you're experiencing issues in the mobile and desktop apps only and Spotify's web player is working as it should, could you let us know if you're using Local Files? It's worth mentioning that they're not supported in the web player.

If you've got Local Files both on your computer and phone, what you could try is heading to the app Settings and toggling Off Local Files to see if this will make a difference.

Additionally, if you've not already tried, it's worth checking out the other suggested steps by @Eni in this post.

It would be helpful if you could share any other steps you've gone over, as well as other details which may help us with the investigation of this behavior and also, let us know:

• If another network connection makes a difference with how the app behaves.
• If it's possible to ask a relative or a friend to log in to their account on your device(s) to see if the behavior would persist.

In the meantime, we're here if anything else comes up.

[VGL_Spud]

Hi, thank you for your help!

I do have local files, however the feature "show local files" is set to off, and they appear as an unavailable song in my playlists in both the app and the web. I then tried my network connection and it appears that switching to my phones personal hotspot has solved the issue and the app is running completely fine. This is the same for my phone as well, when I go onto mobile data it works better than the internet. It is strange that I've never had any other internet problems before as I'm able to run games on my laptop at high speeds, and it seems to be just the Spotify app that is affected by this, not the web.

On wifi, switching to "no proxy" did nothing and neither did disabling hardware acceleration.

Either way I've found the root cause of the issue on my end, but is there any reason for the app to not be working properly on this particular wifi?

[Ivelina]

Hey again @VGL_Spud and thank you for the quick response!

It's great to hear that Spotify is running better for you with mobile data. We can't say exactly why you're experiencing issues with the app with your particular Wi-Fi, but there's something else you could give a try.

We've seen other user posts in the forum where people are experiencing issues with Spotify's behavior and where we've troubleshooted the Wi-Fi network connection, we've noticed that changing the router's DNS settings has been helpful. 

I suggest that you change the DNS settings of your router to 8.8.8.8. To do so, you can:

1. Log in to your router as the admin user
2. Find the router's DNS server, networking, or IP address settings
3. Add the Google public DNS servers to the router's configuration
4. Save the changes
5. Reboot your router and computer

Hopefully this helps and keep us posted.