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.
Completely agree, for example chrome has been observed flushing full state data to disk at regular intervals even with no changes since 2010[1] which is eating battery and SSD lifetime. Firefox does this too as far as I know.
Not to mention the battery impact of poorly written javascript SPA's or advertisements.
It's hard to know what the right call is here. In most cases the battery life hit seems to be fairly minimal (I've never noticed it in any browser, even back when I used chrome), and preventing data loss is, well, fairly important -- at least it can be depending on the site.
OTOH there are almost certainly sites that trigger very bad behavior here. While I've never dug into it too much, it wouldn't surprise me that session store was part of why e.g. IRCCloud or Slack have such high power usage (although I don't know for certain -- it could just as easily be something else).
My understanding is that SSD lifetimes concerns are largely misplaced (or at the very least, only relevant for a fairly small subset of users) and that even reasonably old SSDs can handle well into petabytes of writes -- which is far above what this behavior can reasonably approach. But power usage concerns are totally legitimate IMO.
Full disclosure: I'm not unbiased here, I work on Firefox (but have never touched session store).
This is especially absurd because Apple provides an API (fsevents) specifically designed to let you subscribe to the filesystem changes you care about. But the lump of python dropbox ships as their "application" doesn't know about it.
And instead of putting two engineers on fixing this they also try to "add value" by hijacking the accessibility support of your computer. Fortunately Apple catches this, warns you, and lets you say no.
Despite all this: I have tried Box, Onedrive, iCloud Drive, and Google Drive and still, Dropbox sucks the least in terms of naive user compatibility and fewest surprises. I don't know why this is so hard to get right!?
It must be. They're not pulling a Slack and running a full WebKit in their app. The internal library on MacOS is written in C (or was, they were moving to Objective-C last year).
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?
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.
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.
Although it isn't an electron app it's just a bunch of CEF (Chrome-ium- Embedded Framework) 'panels' mixed in a single window so it's pretty close to an electron app
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 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.
27 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 67.1 ms ] threadAs a developer, I hate that we're becoming a bunch of "whatever"s. I mean this is junk behavior.
Not to mention the battery impact of poorly written javascript SPA's or advertisements.
[1]: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=52663
OTOH there are almost certainly sites that trigger very bad behavior here. While I've never dug into it too much, it wouldn't surprise me that session store was part of why e.g. IRCCloud or Slack have such high power usage (although I don't know for certain -- it could just as easily be something else).
My understanding is that SSD lifetimes concerns are largely misplaced (or at the very least, only relevant for a fairly small subset of users) and that even reasonably old SSDs can handle well into petabytes of writes -- which is far above what this behavior can reasonably approach. But power usage concerns are totally legitimate IMO.
Full disclosure: I'm not unbiased here, I work on Firefox (but have never touched session store).
And instead of putting two engineers on fixing this they also try to "add value" by hijacking the accessibility support of your computer. Fortunately Apple catches this, warns you, and lets you say no.
Despite all this: I have tried Box, Onedrive, iCloud Drive, and Google Drive and still, Dropbox sucks the least in terms of naive user compatibility and fewest surprises. I don't know why this is so hard to get right!?
Not that this issue is necessarily due to sleep itself, but likely due to active polling instead of event handling.
https://community.spotify.com/t5/forums/searchpage/tab/messa...
(Not this CPU issue, but general lack of parity with other players and no movement in that direction.)
https://github.com/jessfraz/dockerfiles/tree/master/spotify
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:
And I see no degradation in performance. This is severely low quality software engineering.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.