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(Mac) Desktop app has memory leak

UPDATE: Version 1.0.96.181 was just released and it should fix this memory leak issue. If you are still having trouble, please post your experience. It will be rolling out, but you should be able to get it by downloading and installing from the Spotify website.

 

I am having a problem with the Mac desktop app -- there is a memory leak. (taking up too much RAM)

 

On my Mac I have always left the Spotify app open for many days usually just a week and then I end up restarting Spotify. I have the Spotify app always open so that it's ready to play music when I want. I keep my Mac on all the time and I have never had any other mac app have a memory leak like this before. I do occasianlly restart my mac as well. I have been doing this for years and this is the first time I randomly get huge memory leaks with Spotify all the time. To fix I have to close the Spotify app and restart it. After I close Spotify, I can see the swap memory (stored on hard drive) being freed up. But the issue keeps coming back no matter how many Spotify app restarts or Mac restarts. 30-40 GB of memory swap gets used and takes up all my free storage.  I thought maybe this was just a rare issue, but I have been having this problem since verison 1.0.88. Right now I am using verison 1.0.93 and I still have the same issue.

 

This problem makes my hard drive unusable and takes up all the free space. I have to constantly restart Spotify. I am also worried about the damage it could be doing to my hard drive writing so much data.

 

macOS Version: 10.14 (happened on 10.13 too)

Spotify Version: 1.0.93

 

memleakspotify.png

Hey folks, 

 

The newest version of Spotify (1.0.96) should solve it. Make sure to have the app up-to-date, and reinstall if it didn't help. 

 

We'll close this one, but if you're still experiencing this, make sure to create a new thread and we'll help out from there. 

 

All the best! 🙂

Comments
johannessiig

 

Plan

Premium

Country

Estonia

Device

MacBook Pro 15" Mid 2014 (dedicated gpu model) + iPhone 6s

Operating System

macOS 10.13.5 && iOS 11.4

 

My Question or Issue

Spotify leaks 18+GB of memory, starts forgetting its playback queue and stops playback randomly when using Spotify Connect to control from iOS device. Screen Shot 2018-06-29 at 21.59.32.png

 

Edit: Must say the memory leak probably happened over a few days. It doesn't start doing that immediately.

Loxer

Hey @johannessiig, welcome to the Community.

 

Hope you are having a great day!

I know it sounds simple, but it's often overlooked. Could you try restarting your device? If that doesn't help, try a quick clean reinstallation of the app. Just follow the steps here.

You could also try to disable Hardware Acceleration. It should help.

 

Hope I was able to help 🙂

johannessiig

Thank you @LorenXK, I really appreciate your helpfulness – but this is mostly a bug report, rather than a request for help – I couldn't figure out where or to whom I should file an actual bug report. Should have stated that the issue clears for a while after restarting Spotify. But the problem remains that it should not start consuming 18GB of RAM (well, mostly swap – in my case) in the first place. No matter what, it should never EVER get that bad. 

 


I've tried restarting and reinstalling Spotify, rebooting the host computer (this one should NOT be necessary on any UNIX-based or -like system, or would at all be helpful for any Electron/NW.js(/Chromium Embedded Framework?) based app, but sure...). The issue seems to return always after a few days of not restarting spotify. And I should not have to restart the app all the time for it to continue behaving normally.

snover

Thank you for mentioning this! I’ve been noticing this exact same problem (accompanied by a blind panic to force quit Spotify since it leaks until I run out of memory and then OS swapfiles consume all the free disk space) and could not figure out any trigger.

 

I don’t ever control playback remotely, but I do occasionally play music on my phone without quitting the desktop app, and it does seem like the problem may start shortly thereafter. I wasn’t able to get it to obviously leak by just opening Spotify on my phone and playing a track there, and it took almost a full day until it got up to leaking 20GB after the last time I used Spotify on my phone, so there must be some additional thing that needs to happen (or it just takes a while to start leaking).

Screen Shot 2018-07-30 at 17.41.47.png
mjbella

I also hit a very similar issue on a regular basis with Spotify running on my MBP. After running for more than a day or so Spotify ends up using more than 20GB of memory (which osx puts into swap).

 

Which channel should I go through to get a bug filed for this issue?

Iite

Also experiencing similar memory leak on my macbook air.

MusicGusto

I experience the same thing, regularly reaches 30 GB+ on my macbook pro at work and macbook air at home. Running MacOS High Sierra.

wman2

I'm experiencing the same issue - I have to force quit the app every couple of days to stop it eating all my memory. Is there an official bug report process?

Guido

Hey @johannessiig@snover@mjbella@MusicGusto,

 

Could you let us know if you are still experiencing this issue? And if needed, please update the info you sent us already. You can see at the top of this topic what we need to further investigate.

 

Thanks!

wman2

Thanks for the reply, Guido. My details:

 

  • MacBook Air, Early 2014 (4GB RAM!)
  • MacOS High Sierra 10.13.4
  • Spotify version 1.0.89.313
  • Screen Shot 2018-08-29 at 10.51.57 am.png