HIGH CPU usage on Mac

I think too few people know about this sort of problem or care about it. Dropbox is another example of a well-known CPU hog: on a Mac, it still insists of watching and processing all filesystem changes, not just those inside the Dropbox subtree, so any file operation you perform anywhere on the computer has a Dropbox tax. You pay with your battery life. And yet, after so many years, this is not enough of an annoyance for them to work on it.

This isn't fixed, it just isn't as bad as it used to be.

When they had apps spotify would spin at ~90% of one core for me. When they had just musixmatch, spotify would switch between 30% and 60%. Now it decides to randomly run at 90% for about ten seconds every few songs.

A workaround:

    cat ~/bin/music
    #!/bin/bash

    error() {
      echo "[Error] $@" 1>&2
    }

    if [ -z "$(which cpulimit 2>/dev/null)" ]; then
      error "Missing package cpulimit"
      exit 1
    fi

    if [ -z "$(which spotify 2>/dev/null)" ]; then
      error "Missing package spotify"
      exit 2
    fi

    if test -t 1; then
      exec 1>/dev/null
    fi

    if test -t 2; then
      exec 2>/dev/null
    fi

    launch() {
      cpulimit -l 30 spotify
    }

    launch &

And I see no degradation in performance. This is severely low quality software engineering.

Welcome to the wonderful world of super-portable web-tech-based apps.

For all people saying this has been fixed: my Spotify on macOS regularly will spike to 90% usage when idling and stay there until I kill it. Reinstalls change nothing.

Seems like a good reason to go @jessfraz and containerize your Spotify client until there's a fix.

https://github.com/jessfraz/dockerfiles/tree/master/spotify

They probably don't prioritize the desktop player but it's the thing that made me cancel my $10/month subscription.

(Not this CPU issue, but general lack of parity with other players and no movement in that direction.)

I have had quite a few issues with Spotify on OSX, but not any issues like this lately. The forum post is old, and the most recent answer is from June last year. Is this really still relevant?

AKA "'sleep(2)' is not a synchronization primitive".

Not that this issue is necessarily due to sleep itself, but likely due to active polling instead of event handling.

I'm hoping that the web version doesn't commit the sins of the desktop version.

For those of us using Chrome, uninstall Spotify desktop app. Make sure you have uBlock and Privacy Badger installed, go to https://play.spotify.com, sign in, and enjoy ad-free Spotify.

Did they ever fix the issue where the desktop app would kill SSDs by performing a large number of writes? I stopped using the desktop version back in October because of that issue.

I'm running spotify 1.0.47 on linux and there's no idle cpu usage from spotify. If I play a song it's using ~ 10% cpu.

The last comment on that thread is from June 2016. I think this has since been fixed?

Yay for electron apps!