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Spotify Is Writing Massive Amounts of Junk Data To Storage Drives (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For almost five months -- possibly longer -- the Spotify music streaming app has been assaulting users' storage devices with enough data to potentially take years off their expected lifespans. Reports of tens or in some cases hundreds of gigabytes being written in an hour aren't uncommon, and occasionally the recorded amounts are measured in terabytes. The overload happens even when Spotify is idle and isn't storing any songs locally. The behavior poses an unnecessary burden on users' storage devices, particularly solid state drives, which come with a finite amount of write capacity. Continuously writing hundreds of gigabytes of needless data to a drive every day for months or years on end has the potential to cause an SSD to die years earlier than it otherwise would. And yet, Spotify apps for Windows, Mac, and Linux have engaged in this data assault since at least the middle of June, when multiple users reported the problem in the company's official support forum. Three Ars reporters who ran Spotify on Macs and PCs had no trouble reproducing the problem reported not only in the above-mentioned Spotify forum but also on Reddit, Hacker News, and elsewhere. Typically, the app wrote from 5 to 10 GB of data in less than an hour on Ars reporters' machines, even when the app was idle. Leaving Spotify running for periods longer than a day resulted in amounts as high as 700 GB. According to comments left in the Spotify forum in the past 24 hours, the bug has been fixed in version 1.0.42, which is in the process of being rolled out.
Nah, then you'd see an increased network usage. This is probably just Firefox's fsync bug repeated: in order to ensure data integrity, SQLite has a mode that fsyncs on commit. (After all, if the data isn't written to storage, it isn't really committed.) If you combine that with autocommit after every minor transaction, you get a ton of fsyncs and massive data usage.
Wonder what this does to people's data plans and consumption of their monthly limits...
So glad I just use local music files and don't stream. Write once, maybe again to add some more music, then just read many,,,
Today's programmers? It's been rampant since at least the 1990's...
It's called Gates Law, because it's the opposite of Moore's Law.
Every 18 months hardware became[1] twice as fast, and every 18 months software becomes[1] half as fast.
[1] This trend has mostly stopped for hardware, but software is still becoming slower with each new version, something I can see at the office where everybody is complaining about how slow the PCs are running with Windows 10, where as mine is running Windows 7 just fine[2].
[2] Well, fine for Windows anyway. Of course things don't happen instantly, like I'm used to on my home Linux machine.