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[dupe] Spotify is writing massive amounts of junk data to storage drives (arstechnica.co.uk)
22 points by GotAnyMegadeth on Nov 11, 2016 | hide | past | favorite | 9 comments




The behavior poses an unnecessary burden on users' storage devices, particularly solid state drives, which come with a finite amount of write capacity.

It's somewhat ironic that since SSDs are completely silent and so much faster at these sorts of writes, it's far easier for huge amounts of unneeded accesses to go unnoticed. The lack of disk activity lights on a lot of newer computers doesn't help matters either.

With spinning-platter drives and HDD lights, constant accesses would be very noticeable, both audibly and visually, and perhaps even more people would press for a fix sooner.


A few months ago I discovered that spotify was causing my laptop battery to drain whenever it was open and I was not using it. I didn't bother to dig into it further but I guess that's what was causing the problem. I don't use Spotify ever so I wound up deleting it.


Is any way of knowing what is inside all of those writes? I mean, what is the purpose of writing when idle?


Based on what I read in the suggested manual fixes in the thread, their SQLite db is constantly being VACUUM'd.


It is a world-wide backup of a Spotify developers private MP3 archive.


It's a bug. They were issuing VACUUM to the SQLite database way too often. Which, apparently, reacreates the database from scratch, since SQLite is by design rather simplistic.





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