Ask HN: Why Spotify Helper consumes 90% of my CPU?
That is absurd! MP3 player waste 90% of the CPU resources of my Macbook Pro. Why do we tolerate such abuse from corporations and don't demand them to be more responsible?
Odds are, not everyone using Spotify has it use 90% of the CPU as otherwise few people would actually use it, I certainly wouldn't.
Personally, Spotify is right now using about 3% of my CPU when playing songs on Linux, Spotify 1.1.72.439, which doesn't seem so bad to me. It uses more RAM than expected though, but not really a problem that makes me go "How do people accept such abuse?!"
Edit: if you want to solve the problem for yourself and like the service Spotify while not liking the client they offer, you can try open source 3rd party clients based on librespot (https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot/), some of them work really well.
But disregarding that, I completely agree with you and that's why I don't use any of those services. Just download all of your music as flac and play it with whatever player.
all the competent engineers who have no time for irrelevant repetitive code interviews were filtered out