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Spotify excessively writing to drive

439 points| boernard | 9 years ago |community.spotify.com | reply

256 comments

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[+] philipkglass|9 years ago|reply
I had to go through a lot of comments in that thread to find a working workaround.

On OS X, Open /Applications/Spotify.app/Contents/MacOS/Spotify in a hex editor.

Search for "VACUUM;" Replace with "xxxxxx;"

On Windows, apparently the key "VACUUM;" string is in libcef.dll but I don't have a Windows system to see if editing it the same way provides a workaround like on OS X.

I used hexcurse from homebrew. After opening the file hit tab once to switch to the ASCII side, Control-F to search for VACUUM;, then type "x" six times to overwrite each character. Quit and save.

EDIT: fixes

[+] phab|9 years ago|reply
I think it's pretty astounding that a customer complaint thread has run to 17 pages, direct contact on twitter, a HN story and customers going to such extreme lengths as editing their binary...

... and not one engagement from Spotify themselves on the thread. Seems like pretty poor customer support to me.

[+] stupidcar|9 years ago|reply
The Spotify desktop client had a bug where, every time you pressed "back", it would lose the scroll position on the previous page. It would show you the correct point, but when you tried to interact with it, it would jump back to the top of the page. It was incredibly frustrating if you were trying to browse through an artist's albums.

This is the kind of bug that should have been easily caught by automated regression testing. It wasn't. That should have been easily caught by a pre-release QA process. It wasn't. The kind that, if it it sneaked into a release, should have been triggered a rollback or a quick patch. It didn't.

Instead, they left this ugly bug in place for months. Despite dozens of complaints of their support forums, containing hundreds of posts. And throughout, I never saw a single official response from a Spotify employee. The only communication was hearsay through volunteer moderators, who said it was being "worked on", but with no suggestion of why it wasn't being fixed sooner, or when it actually would be.

Spotify push out updates to their client almost every few days, but it's clear their software development process is garbage, and that their developers are either unwilling, or unable to prioritise basic bug fixes. If I had to guess, I'd suggest that it's a combination of technical debt and bad processes inherited from their startup days, combined with a management focus on features that support monetisation goals rather than basic maintenance.

[+] brink|9 years ago|reply
I just spent 3 weeks talking in circles about their Android app and buggy Bluetooth support. Even after telling them that I'm a software engineer and explaining the technicalities of the bug that was happening, I still got referred to the "Bluetooth setup" section of their guides with a copy / paste email. After several more emails it ended in "we'll email you when we have more info".

I started my Google play music subscription two days ago. Their customer support beyond pre-recorded rhetoric is abysmal.

[+] croon|9 years ago|reply
Agreed.

For a service I love dearly and have been using for 8 years, both their client applications and their support thereof has always been astoundingly lacking.

I've reported numerous bugs, and they almost always go unanswered for years, while some community elevated user will respond in a well-meaning but non-relevant answer, suggesting some run-of-the-mill IT tech solution, without any insight into the actual problem nor the Spotify tech.

I have rarely ever seen a Spotify rep taking client bugs seriously. Which is a shame.

But on that note: Has anyone tried Tomahawk? Or any other alternative client? I've been meaning to try something else but haven't gotten around to it.

[+] rahoulb|9 years ago|reply
I am a participant in one 45+ page thread that has spanned two years (client failures when using the iOS app with CarPlay). Several participants have posted exact steps to reproduce, including model and firmware numbers and yet there was one response, two years ago, from Spotify, stating that they were aware of the issue and we should try version 3.X (we're on version 6.X now).

It's so frustrating and totally avoidable on their part (just a check-in saying "we're still not sure what the cause is but we are looking at it" would make such a difference)

[+] udkl|9 years ago|reply
I've had a similar poor customer support.

They constantly kept redirecting me to their forums or to their FAQ's when my payment wasn't going through.

Finally I raised a support request and awaited their reply. That was a few months ago. Since I didn't hear back from them I gave my money to Google play music (even though I'm not a fan of the google play UI or the app).

[+] simonswords82|9 years ago|reply
When the value your offering provides, which in Spotify's case is a ridiculous amount of music for a few bucks a month, most customers will forgive less than perfect software.

Obviously HN has a techie lean, and we dislike "bad" software but in the real world this matters little to 90+% of Spotify's customer base I'm sure.

[+] ivraatiems|9 years ago|reply
This is a recurring, continuous pattern with Spotify. They don't care about artists, customers, or even record labels. Their dev process is awful. They never communicate. They push through awful UI redesigns (we just got one the other day, and it's just lots and lots of white space at the bottom of the page). Their customer support is terrible. AND they're screwing over artists who make less than a penny per play.

And despite all this, I am still using their service. None of the competitors have what I want/need.

[+] alkonaut|9 years ago|reply
And what is up with the issue? It's marked as "Closed" without any interaction from Spotify?

Was it closed as Fixed? Duplicate? Wontfix?

[+] tdkl|9 years ago|reply
Probably at this point it's time to vote with the wallet and let them know why.
[+] nrki|9 years ago|reply
+1, I've cancelled my subscription and moved to Play Music.
[+] 0xCMP|9 years ago|reply
Just checked on a Mac with 10 days uptime in Activity Monitor and Spotify has written 28.99GB and read 325MB. For comparison Chrome wrote 1.93GB, iCloud (cloudd) wrote 10.47GB, Mail 927.4 MB, and Slack 607.8MB.
[+] bdz|9 years ago|reply
Is that really a big problem? I mean most modern SSDs works fine until at least 600 TB which is like 16 years with that 100GB/day rate

>Errors didn't strike the Samsung 840 Series until after 300TB of writes, and it took over 700TB to induce the first failures. The fact that the 840 Pro exceeded 2.4PB is nothing short of amazing, even if that achievement is also kind of academic.

http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experim...

[+] technojunkie|9 years ago|reply
I only used web based Spotify https://play.spotify.com/

You can block all ads with uBlock Origin too.

I can't find a reason to download the application now.

[+] toomanybeersies|9 years ago|reply
Well the application doesn't require flash.
[+] ukyrgf|9 years ago|reply
A good reason would be if you have a Premium account and want to listen to something better than 128kbps MP3s.
[+] cjg_|9 years ago|reply
Seems they rolled out a fix now:

"We've seen some questions in our Community around the amount of written data using the Spotify client on desktop. These have been reviewed and any potential concerns have now been addressed in version 1.0.42, currently rolling out to all users."

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Ongoing-Issues/Major-I-O-wr...

[+] justanton|9 years ago|reply
I have this version: so far looks better around 200MB written while listening for cca 30 minutes.

I really hope they've fixed this.

[+] Spooks|9 years ago|reply
This is pretty interesting. Should software that destroy someone's physical items be handled the same way as hardware destroying something physical (Samsung Note 7 for an exaggerated example).
[+] erkose|9 years ago|reply
The software in not "destroying" the SSD. It is using it properly, but excessively.
[+] r1ch|9 years ago|reply
Back in the HDD age, you had to optimize applications for sequential I/O and minimize disk seeks. When you tested your software, you could audibly hear the HDD grinding away with seeks. With an SSD there's no feedback like slow loading or seek sounds to indicate you have bad I/O patterns or are constantly writing to the drive. This certainly isn't the first case of an app going crazy with writes.

A great testing tool would be to induce latency on seeks or keeps track of writes / fake disk seek sounds to avoid these kinds of problems going undetected during development.

[+] luhn|9 years ago|reply
Spotify's Mac app also gobbles up memory. I regularly see it consuming more than a gigabyte. As someone who's still running an 8GB machine, that bytes.
[+] developer2|9 years ago|reply
I'm sorry, but this has been reported since 5 months ago. How on Earth has this not been officially fixed by Spotify? Same problem here. What a joke.
[+] subie|9 years ago|reply
I had heard Spotify uses P2P quite a bit.

People on this forum are reporting that its eating up 50GB's on idle. Could it be possible they are using idle clients to help stream content to other users?

[+] jpalomaki|9 years ago|reply
Based on quick glance to the thread, somebody has pin pointed the problem to embedded SQLite database vacuum operation. That is optimizing the storage of database and maybe it is being called too often.
[+] stephengillie|9 years ago|reply
Spotify has a few nifty features that must be using a fair bit of bandwidth. Features such as the ability to remote control another instance means maintaining a control channel. The ability to switch music to your local device means all devices must stream the song, as though it were playing on that device, to allow immediate switching.

These work quite well for the user, as it's enjoyable to listen to music on your stereo at home, then just tell the phone app to switch from your stereo to your phone (maybe over headphones) while you're mobile. And heavy use of P2P between devices on the same LAN or Wifi network would reduce internet bandwidth use, but may unintentionally cause a lot of churn and disk use.

[+] pmalynin|9 years ago|reply
Okay but streaming content is a read operation, not write.
[+] lobster_johnson|9 years ago|reply
Spotify used to be P2P, several years ago. These days it streams directly from Spotify's cloud servers (or technically Google's).
[+] mynameisvlad|9 years ago|reply
It looks like most of it is being written to a SQLite DB, so probably not.
[+] 45h34jh53k4j|9 years ago|reply
Serious question - how are you able to modify an application binary and not have the OS refuse to run it?

Is spotify shipping an unsigned binary?

[+] toyg|9 years ago|reply
Does OSX actually check signatures anytime after installation ? If yes, how do auto-updates work, do they update the signature every time?
[+] kevinchen|9 years ago|reply
App signature checks aren't required to succeed on macOS -- the user has the ability to override it globally in System Preferences, or add an exception using the right-click menu.
[+] potrebitel|9 years ago|reply
Good !

Finally this is taken to a level where Spotify might actually notice something !

There were/are threads on their forum and basically nothing happens as they seems to not care for the users.

[+] scrollaway|9 years ago|reply
To those who start with the comments: this is about Spotify the application, not Spotify the company. Big difference:)
[+] serg_chernata|9 years ago|reply
Good tip, I also thought this was about some kind of SSD reliability testing done by their engineers.
[+] radicality|9 years ago|reply
How else could it be interpreted?
[+] sigil|9 years ago|reply
Wow. I'm a Spotify on Linux user and I've been trying to track down this issue for months. System Load Indicator showed huge write spikes, but they were brief enough that I hadn't yet caught the culprit red-handed in iotop. They bring I/O to a crawl for a second or two though.

Look what I found with a `cat /proc/$pid/io` on the main spotify process:

    rchar: 315169616727
    wchar: 236191291851
    syscr: 320352243
    syscw: 330963886
    read_bytes: 945213440
    write_bytes: 230711586816
    cancelled_write_bytes: 51481772032
That's 230GB written over 6 days of uptime. Granted, some of that is to the network, to an audio device, or just normal download caching. Still...good grief.
[+] bassman9000|9 years ago|reply
Same here.

I had the gut feeling something had been wrong with the Linux client for a while. Spotify also tends to show up pretty high in h/top, aside from iotop.

[+] Dramatize|9 years ago|reply
8 days uptime and Spotify has written 272GB
[+] ricardobeat|9 years ago|reply
Ha! I have had this problem for months (OSX) and never looked at Spotify. In the past few days it has written 22GB already, every few weeks I run out of disk space and never had a clue why, restarting would reclaim it.
[+] manmal|9 years ago|reply
This should not be the reason why you run out of space. Might be memory swapping that gets released on reboot, or it's because Photoshop is closed when shutting down (scratch disk).
[+] flocial|9 years ago|reply
Actually, with regard to the other comments, this could very well be the reason the parent runs out of disk space due to OSX's swap files/sleep image (I think it's fixed in the more recent versions).
[+] toyg|9 years ago|reply
This bug generates disk activity but does not actually leave files around, so it's not your issue I'm afraid.
[+] willlll|9 years ago|reply
I wonder if they are also aggressively vacuuming the sqlite db on mobile devices too.
[+] eunice|9 years ago|reply
The spotify desktop app is really shoddy, i've had problems with the 'spotify helper' process on osx draining cpu/battery and causing the fan to start, had to write a script to kill it if it's using over 90% cpu. There are posts on their support forum about that issue going back four + years so I wouldn't expect this to get fixed any time soon.