Announcements
The Spotify Stars Program: Celebrating Values Week!

Help Wizard

Step 1

NEXT STEP

Spotify uses too much RAM

Solved!

Spotify uses too much RAM

Spotify uses a gread amount of RAM. Everytime I check it is about 650 mb, which is a lot!

 

Version is 1.0.4.90.

Reply

Accepted Solutions
Marked as solution

I turned off hardware acceleration and I dropped from 1.2GB of ram to only 150MB. Spotify probably uses this option as a "contract" to use more resources from your pc than it really needs to.

 

To do so, Open your desktop appliction, go to the top left of spotify and find view, finally uncheck "Hardware Acceleration."

 

 

Hopefully this helps you, it helped me tons

View solution in original post

26 Replies

Please try clean reinstall.

1, Uninstall Spotify from "Programs and Features" in Control Panel
2. Remove all spotify folders on your PC
3. Download and run CCleaner, clean and repair your registry.( http://download.cnet.com/CCleaner/ )
4. Restart your pc.
3. Install the latest version of spotify.
If my post helped you to fix your problem, please press "Accept as Solution" button.

What would you recommend doing for mac users? I've had one SpotifyHelper process use up to and over 1 GB of RAM in my computer.


@maddrum9 wrote:

Spotify uses a gread amount of RAM. Everytime I check it is about 650 mb, which is a lot!

 

Version is 1.0.4.90.


I'm quite sure this is intended behavior, especially since Spotify prevents itself from using more than 650 MB of RAM (at least for extended periods of time). It is incredibly common for computers today, even entry-level laptops (see: Dell Inspirion, HP Pavillion), to have 8 GB of RAM stock. On an 8 GB machine, Spotify will therefore use at most 8% of the total avalible RAM. Older computers may have as low as 4 GB of RAM, and even on these machines, it's only 16% of the avaliable RAM.


@jnmacdnld wrote:
On an 8 GB machine, Spotify will therefore use at most 8% of the total avalible RAM. Older computers may have as low as 4 GB of RAM, and even on these machines, it's only 16% of the avaliable RAM.

And then you run Chrome and maybe Skype and all of a sudden half your RAM is blocked with only 3 applications... 

 

You're absolutely right, though. These days commercial software development does not really focus on performance and efficient use of resources. The standing assumption is that everyone has more computing power than they can ever use. Of course, eventually even 8 gigs of RAM are not sufficient anymore. And then what? Well, people have to buy new machines with 16 gig and the cycle repeats... 

 

Lazy **bleep** programmers! Or should I rather say greedy **bleep** IT companies?

Spotify is using Chromium as their backend for the clients nowadays, which basically means you're using a glorified web browser to listen to your music - and we all know how resource heavy Chrome is these days. It made it easier for the developers of Spotify since it's now a common code-base across devices, but in turn became much worse for desktop users. Go figure...

 

Since the new "1.0" update is quite horrible anyway, you're better of using the web player or roll back to a version more optimised for desktop interaction. Don't expect the RAM usage to get lower with future updates.


- - -
"There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite."
- Jorge Luis Borges


@Zephyr wrote:

Spotify is using Chromium as their backend for the clients nowadays, which basically means you're using a glorified web browser to listen to your music - and we all know how resource heavy Chrome is these days. It made it easier for the developers of Spotify since it's now a common code-base across devices, but in turn became much worse for desktop users. Go figure...

 

Since the new "1.0" update is quite horrible anyway, you're better of using the web player or roll back to a version more optimised for desktop interaction. Don't expect the RAM usage to get lower with future updates.


This. I forgot this. In addition, every time you open up a new view in Spotify, it's as if you opened up another tab in Chrome, so memory usage goes up. This post on Quora has more information.

1 GB

 

Spotify uses more than 650 megs of ram. My just hit 1 GB of RAM usage! Nice, A?!

are you having a giggle

zfu.png

have just built a computer with I7 4.2GHZ processor and 16 GB ram SSD hard drives and all the rest. 

i have always found since installation any time you try to do anything on your computer spotiffy jumps and crackles like it is struggling for resources, this should not be the case with the level of computer i have. this is ridiculous, paying for premium and your client is terrible, may have to go to ggogles service as my friend with same spec pc has no issues running that and all his other programs 

 

i have the same problem.
sadly, i can't afford a new pc and the current one has only 4 gb ram. i'd like to play (league of legends), to use voice chat (teamspeak or maybe skype but that's always eating up my system resources anyway) and to listen to spotify, simultaneously. nothing more. usually i end up with a grey screen of death after glitched video and sound. troublesome.
it'd be awesome if any 'light' version of spotify would exist! as i really enjoy spotify, it's really the best streaming / podcast service i've had so far.

Although I'm quite low at 400mb, this is still quite a lot of memory. I'm a developer who needs to use a lot of different apps at the same time, and with my crappy as Macbook which soldered the memory on the motherboard, I can't extend to 16gb -_-

Marked as solution

I turned off hardware acceleration and I dropped from 1.2GB of ram to only 150MB. Spotify probably uses this option as a "contract" to use more resources from your pc than it really needs to.

 

To do so, Open your desktop appliction, go to the top left of spotify and find view, finally uncheck "Hardware Acceleration."

 

 

Hopefully this helps you, it helped me tons

751MiB mem usage..751MiB ram usage..

I've had the same issue with the ram, it's atually memory on your phone, which they use a lot of. Computer have ram. And I've been tweeting them about this. If u tweet them about this on Spotify cares they will reply to. They have great support.

I left my computer running overnight (MacBook Pro, Late 2013, OS X 10.11.6, 16GB RAM), and came back to a message I've never seen before (your system has run out of memory).  Started up Activity Monitor to see who the culprit was....  

Screen Shot 2017-04-19 at 8.59.39 AM.png
Screen Shot 2017-04-19 at 9.00.45 AM.png

Compare that to Opera or Chome who nowadays use less than 400 MB.

It's a shame for a piece of software that plays music to eat away such an amount of RAM no matter how much RAM you have. I have 64GB of RAM and if something uses 400MB while doing very little then I am concerned the moneys errhmmm I meant, programmers who made this didn't do a very well job on memory management. (Yes I can say that as I am a programmer myself)

Yea.. generally it fluctuates but this screenshot was taken when I simply had the app open and it was playing through the queue. ZERO INTERACTION WITH IT - and yet.. almost 1 GB in RAM. C'mon guys - really?

Enhancement Idea -- Be able to select different 'themes' for the app, which would correlate to different levels of memory usage. For example - take Windows... their Win7 Basic theme cuts-out all of the fancy graphic features and significantly improves performance, esp. for an older machine.

SpotifyMemory.jpg

I cannot see this option anywhere... Can u help me out guys, is there any other way to fix it? This RAM usage is killing me. Thanks in advance.

same problem here, it seems even a browser by the amount of RAM that the application consumes (almost 500MB of RAM and 50% CPU only scrolling the pages)

Suggested posts