Spotify App Accused of Thrashing Storage Drives With Excessive Data Writes

[JJayguy23]

Well, this is disconcerting. I don't even know where to begin. And yes, I too saw about 250GB had been written by Spotify! Now that I think about it, I believe I've had this issue for months (but didn't realize it was chronic)! That is so unacceptable for any app, but absolutely preposterous for such a seemingly lightweight streaming application! I immediately updated, but who knows how long this issue has been going on... Poor SSD, sorry for Spotify's foolishness.

Spotify needs to do more than issue an update.... they may have caused irreparable damage to our machines.... I almost feel like they should offer to replace any prematurely failing SSDs! I smell a class action lawsuit coming....
[doublepost=1479034563][/doublepost]Also, I found a thread on Apple forums about an application to check SSD status.

Xpost from Apple Forums:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4993862?tstart=0

I advise you to check out DriveDx: http://binaryfruit.com/drivedx . It shows SSD Lifetime Left indicator, overall health rating, important health indicators and many other useful information about SSD. With clean and user-friendly Mac-style interface. (HDDs are supported too)

 

[calderone]

I did some testing with this recently and get this. Even if you are playing music from your phone, if you have the Desktop app open it STILL writes out to disk.

The only remedy is to keep it closed.

 

[Rigby]

Firefox: about:config browser.cache.disk.enable;false

This does not address the core of the problem. The critical setting is browser.sessionstore.interval to reduce the constant saving of the session state even when you're not actively browsing. See here:

https://www.servethehome.com/firefox-is-eating-your-ssd-here-is-how-to-fix-it/

 

[strayts]

I'm mostly an Apple Music user, and I have a fairly powerful Mac, so I never really noticed this in the rare times I've had Spotify open. However, I just tested it out by playing one song—only 2mb written throughout the whole song and into the next. I paused the music and let Spotify hang in the background for 20~ minutes. When I came back, it had written 1.2GB!!! What on earth for?

 

[nextuser]

it's not just Spotify, Chrome, Firefox and Edge all do something similar when you leave the browser running on your machine.

Well the Spotify app is basically Chrome, it's using the Chrome Embedded Framework

 

[sudo1996]

I have spinning disks, so I don't care. I don't have Spotify, so I don't care. But I do have iStat Menus and I've never seen macOS just sit there and do "nothing" with the disk drive.

Yeah, I see it doing "nothing" for maybe 5 seconds at a time at most. The OS has a lot going on.

Spotify has always seemed somewhat bloated to me the few times I used it. I also didn't like that it made itself a login item without telling me, like what Windows apps tend to do. But it's nice that they have an HTML-based player instead of forcing the standalone app.
[doublepost=1479084045][/doublepost]

it's not just Spotify, Chrome, Firefox and Edge all do something similar when you leave the browser running on your machine.

Wait what? Safari doesn't, and I don't think I've seen any other browsers do that.

 

[Michaelgtrusa]

From what i'm hearing, it's not resolved.

 

[JamesPDX]

This does not address the core of the problem. The critical setting is browser.sessionstore.interval to reduce the constant saving of the session state even when you're not actively browsing. See here:

https://www.servethehome.com/firefox-is-eating-your-ssd-here-is-how-to-fix-it/

Thanks for this. I changed it to 30 minute intervals. So caching only to RAM is separate from the browser.sessionstore?

 

[Vjosullivan]

Anyone know if there is a log of spotify usage since installation so I can look if I was affected by the bug?

If you need to see the log to see if you're affected ... you not affected.

 

[JJayguy23]

From what i'm hearing, it's not resolved.

No more issues after updating on my machine. Perhaps you were told misinformation...

 

[JamesPDX]

Yeah, I see it doing "nothing" for maybe 5 seconds at a time at most. The OS has a lot going on.

Spotify has always seemed somewhat bloated to me the few times I used it. I also didn't like that it made itself a login item without telling me, like what Windows apps tend to do. But it's nice that they have an HTML-based player instead of forcing the standalone app.
[doublepost=1479084045][/doublepost]
Wait what? Safari doesn't, and I don't think I've seen any other browsers do that.

I wonder what the world-cpu+ram equivalent is of