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Why is Spotify chugging upload bandwidth when it is not streaming?
- mmuro 14y agoI ditched this service when they paused ads while I muted.
- beaumartinez 14y agoSeriously? You're given an entire library of music for free, all you have to do is put up with the occasional ad between songs.
- shawabawa3 14y agoThe ads on spotify really are unacceptably annoying imo. And it's not like spotify is the only way of getting music for free
- pixeloution 14y agoNot sure how true this is currently; I've got spotify premium up at the moment and according to ActivityMonitor I've got no data outgoing.
- whaevr 14y agoGo to page 4 of the thread, I posted on it recently with my spiel and Ive included a screenshot of my whatpulse client showing network usage http://i45.tinypic.com/2vc8f0j.jpg%5B/IMG%5D http://i45.tinypic.com/2vc8f0j.jpg%5B/IMG%5D Thats from this morning
- kmfrk 14y agoBlizzard's abhorrent P2P torrent client does the same, unless you uncheck some default settings in it. Just ridiculous.
- sturmeh 14y agoAt least you can turn it off in Blizzard's client.
- skreech 14y agoWould be decent of Spotify to tell you / ask you nicely. But if you're gaming, why not just quit Spotify and other programs you're not using?
- pawelwentpawel 14y agoMaybe he is listening to music while gaming? Or uploading something completely else. It doesn't matter what he is doing, something like that shouldn't happen. And it's not just decent/nice to ask user if your app is about to suddenly use 100% of upload speed in the background - it's common sense.
- whaevr 14y agoWell I like to use Spotify for music to listen to while I game..which you know, when I thought the application just streamed I figured wouldnt have much an impact on the game. Im not saying using p2p in spotify is bad, I just want it to be more obvious and at least a way to control its max upload rate in the program itself. The fact that people need to download a 3rd party app to limit spotify from swamping their internet connection is stupid.
- nicholassmith 14y agoIt does actually say in the T&Cs that it's going to use you as a p2p node if I remember rightly, it's been a while since I've seen the header but it was listed as 'Computational resources'.
- freehunter 14y agoIt's really getting to the point where T&C should be standardized and any extra conditions they want to throw at you should be presented front and center.
- jlogsdon 14y agoYeah, and everyone reads those.
- nicholassmith 14y ago
- pfortuny 14y agoIt always was P2P, that is the way they (I see now, USED TO) describe their technology (I remember reading about this in their homepage some years ago, now it has turned into a strange content hub). So, if it is not streaming, then you are streaming.
- waterlesscloud 14y agoIt's annoying enough that I shut Spotify down when I'm not using it. Then they get 0% of my bandwidth. I suppose there's enough lazy/unaware people that it doesn't matter.
- kzrdude 14y agoI hope you mean you also kill the background process they leave running.
- waterlesscloud 14y agoI don't see any background process running when I shut it down on Linux, and my bandwidth monitor immediately shows any unusual uploading activity coming to an end.
- ta123987 14y agoTrickle could be useful for you: http://monkey.org/~marius/pages/?page=trickle http://monkey.org/~marius/pages/?page=trickle
- waterlesscloud 14y agoYou know, that's a good idea. Thanks for bringing that up!
- defect 14y agoLast i heard idle clients (i.e. not currently streaming) are supposed to drop out of the P2P overlay, so it shouldn't be uploading if you haven't listened to music for a while. I haven't tested if this is actually the case though.
- iamben 14y agoIf you're using premium, why not just download the albums / playlists you want and set Spotify into 'Offline Mode'?
- doktrin 14y agoThat's a labor intensive solution to a problem which should not exist in the first place. Speaking as a premium subscriber, I really value simple music discovery. I would be downloading or purchasing my own music if I felt strongly about micro managing my collection. If I feel like coding to someone else's 2000 track psychedelic trance playlist which I just happened across - I would like to do so without mucking around with some monstrous download (or, even worse, having to spend time cherry picking tracks I want). Likewise, perhaps I want to use classify (classical music discovery) and select a playlist based on mood. Again, creating my own playlist is at this point a simple inconvenience. This problem shouldn't exist, and Spotify certainly owes its users some form of solution.
- iamben 14y agoSure - I'm not saying it's the solution, just an option if it really bothers you.
- rogem002 14y agoWhile this is an option, I prefer to stream my music than have it using space on my solid state drive and I only have premium to avoid adverts.
- lmm 14y agoMay I just say, as someone who's often been critical of them in the past, thank you to the mods for setting a far more constructive title than the original submission.
- whaevr 14y agoApologies for that, this is my first submission to HN
- kintamanimatt 14y agoWhat was the original title?
- luser001 14y agoI use Spotify on Ubuntu Linux. Looking into how it behaves there.
- threedaymonk 14y agoIt might be worth trying to run it through trickle to limit the allowed upload bandwidth. http://monkey.org/~marius/pages/?page=trickle http://monkey.org/~marius/pages/?page=trickle [Edit] I see someone else has linked to trickle above.
- luser001 14y agoAwesome. Ubuntu even has packages for this. Thanks for the tip!
- luser001 14y agoI didn't see it uploading a lot over about 20 minutes. (1) I was listening to an obscure album, (2) I listen to small number of songs repeatedly, although I have a large number "starred" and in playlists from previous installs of the app.
- bobsy 14y agoI have never liked this about Spotify... So the solutions outlined by Spotify are... 1) Suck it up. Its how the system works. 2) Use the web player. (Seems to be invite-only beta - US Only) 3) Use offline mode. Unlimited members pay for the service and cannot download tracks so not much use to those. Somewhat kills music discovery. Means you cannot use the radio option. Do social options work in offline mode? Not much point if they do as you would need to go online to play any new tracks. 4) Set cache size really small. (someone reported this doesn't work) Wouldn't this mean a big spike in downloads as none of your songs are cached? Its crappy. I remember when I used to play counter-strike and I would have to shut down Spotify as it would kill my ping and make the game lag terribly. Launching in game radio though would be fine... Asking free members to suck it up is fine. They are using the service for free and get a few ad's. Another cost to service is fine. For paid members though there needs to be an option to drastically tune down the upload rate and even disable it if you are not listening to music yourself. Spotify have been inactive on this issue to date. My hopes are fairly low that they will resolve it any time soon.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- radnor 14y agoHow about setting up a firewall rule so that Spotify can only talk to Spotify's servers? Here's a post from Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/spotify/comments/jdhj6/is_there_a_way_to_disable_spotifys_p2p_traffic/c2bb178 http://www.reddit.com/r/spotify/comments/jdhj6/is_there_a_wa...
- easy_rider 14y agoRight. I was just about to say. This is hackers do it. Sniff out the traffic and block really selectively. My concern woud be: Am I violating TOS when i don't share bandwidth?
- redblacktree 14y agoGood point. You can go to jail for that; it makes you a felon.
- darrenkopp 14y agoI don't use Spotify anymore, but when I did I was completely aware that this was happening, and ultimately I'm not too bothered by it using my connection to support other clients, because that's partly how it starts playing so fast. I would be very upset if it was using my entire connection. Spotify should cap the speed at like 128KB/s, because that should be plenty for what they are doing. If they were using my full connection, I would be furious, because I'm not a data center for them, and I know how much data centers charge for bandwidth, and they would be getting an insane deal (my home connection is 100/100Mb). It should probably have a cap for how long they are using your connection also. Once you've shared as much as you've downloaded, your connection should either stop sharing or go to an even lower speed.
- bbrks 14y agoEven at a 128KB/s fixed upload, that is still ~2x as much as my upload speed limit on UK ADSL.
- apawloski 14y agoIs that a typical speed limit in the UK?
- shanelja 14y agoNot really, I am running Virgin Media and get a 60mb/s line for £24.99 / month including a phone, I've clocked it at around 43mb/s download and 4mb/s upload, the upload is still fairly abysmal, but it's enough for home usage.
- citricsquid 14y agoNot a typical limit but can often be a limitation in certain areas. My parents have ~220kb/s down, 70kb/s up due to poor quality wiring and being far from the exchange. Most UK cities are reasonable, but go out to the smaller areas with only ADSL and it goes to all hell.
- rmrfrmrf 14y agoSurely people here know how to shape their bandwidth...?
- to3m 14y agoAt least one person (me) who doesn't! Sadly there isn't time to become knowledgable about everything, and I never found network administration very interesting anyway.
- rmrfrmrf 14y agoWhich OS are you running?
- teod 14y agoIf not, it can be done using Linux's tc command.
- samstave 14y agoYep and here is a graph of usage: / / / /
- mcculley 14y agoI had to ban Spotify on our office network as the clients don't take into account how many users are on the local net and scale back accordingly. It only took a handful of users to soak up a noticeable amount of upload bandwidth. That and there is an operational security issue with a program that uploads files from the local disk to untrusted peers and encrypts everything such that one cannot tell what it is uploading.
- freehunter 14y agoWhat sucks is that here at work (I work in corporate information security), we have developers who love to listen to music when they're programming. I support it. I like listening to music too. The problem is, some of them like Spotify. And since Spotify is peer-to-peer (and p2p applications are against the policy), it gets flagged in our security monitoring tool. And when it gets flagged, I have to make that action stop. And if it's flagged as a high priority, I have to report them to HR. Some people don't know it's p2p, some don't care. They've paid for it and they want to listen to it. But there's no way to turn off the p2p nature of the program. We run into this issue with Skype constantly too. People want to use these programs, and have valid reasons to use them. But our business cannot accept the risk of peer to peer traffic on our protected network, so away they go. If there was even the slightest bit of obscure and dangerous and unsupported configuration options that left a backdoor to being able to turn off the p2p, I would love it. But there's not.
- krakensden 14y agoSince Microsoft bought Skype, I heard they turned off the p2p part.
- freehunter 14y agoIt's possible there are some clients that do not have p2p enabled, but I can confirm that the clients I'm seeing do still have p2p enabled and active.
- mcculley 14y ago
- calstars 14y agoDo the mobile clients also use P2P?
- jthomp 14y agoThat's a good question, maybe on WiFi? It certainly shouldn't when on 3G/4G.
- allbutlost 14y agoNo, I'm pretty sure they don't.
- alpeb 14y agoNo, per the "spotify technology" article linked to in the discussion-.
- dromidas 14y agomobile clients have their own set of bandwidth issues. I play 1 playlist on my phone, it is available locally (all downloaded long ago), and yet spotify has used over 2gb of bandwidth in the last 20 days. There's a huge thread about it on the spotify forums somewhere.
- sturmeh 14y agoIf your phone is low on space to cache your entire Spotify offline library, it will continuously stream/thash for cache space as you play it all.
- crazygringo 14y agoWhat is the best way, under OSX or Windows, to selectively limit upload (or download) speeds per-application? Is there a way? It would be so nice if something like this were built into the OS, but is there any kind of third-party software which will do that?
- toni 14y agoon OSX: Little Snitch on Windows: Netlimiter
- dewey 14y agoHe's asking for something to "selectively limit upload (or download) speeds per-application?" not how to block an application from communicating at all. (Little Snitch)
- MetricMike 14y agohttp://superuser.com/questions/135719/windows-program-to-limit-bandwidth-of-other-programs http://superuser.com/questions/135719/windows-program-to-lim... NetLimiter (free) and NetBalancer (paid, free for 5 processes) have been the go-to solutions for Windows for a little while. IceFloor (http://www.hanynet.com/icefloor/index.html http://www.hanynet.com/icefloor/index.html) is the OSX (10.7+) analog.
- j_s 14y agohttp://superuser.com/questions/474255/is-there-a-free-local-network-bandwidth-limiter-software http://superuser.com/questions/474255/is-there-a-free-local-... also lists http://bandwidthcontroller.com/trafficShaperXp.html http://bandwidthcontroller.com/trafficShaperXp.html
- adrinavarro 14y agoSadly IceFloor doesn't seem to have an option to quickly filter out in a per-program basis. And Little Snitch, well…maybe a bit overpriced if it's just to block Spotify (hell, they should be the ones providing a setting for that).
- taylorbuley 14y agoI didn't know this. Although as a tech reporter I should have, I would argue that typical people are unaware of these kinds of architectural implications and that without obvious disclosure this design decision sort of takes advantage of users. Customers are paying twice, for the service and for other people's data, and it shouldn't take a Hacker News-level understanding of technology for them to be aware of this fact. It feels icky and reminds me of when I found out that Dropbox was "sharing" my files with other users: http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2011/04/how-dropbox-sacrifices-user-privacy-for.html http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2011/04/how-dropbox-sacrifices-u...
- gonecrazy456 14y agoYou idiot reporter dont you have anything else to do rather than bitching about struggling good companies ?
- nthj 14y agoI commonly stream Spotify on my MacBook while tethering via my iPhone at coffee shops. Little did I know I was paying $10/GB to let others listen to music. Thanks, Spotify, thanks.
- puivert 14y agoInternet is peer to peer. If you are a victim of packet beancounters, the onus is on you to filter your traffic and apps to conform.
- phatboyslim 14y agoI disagree. The average user has no time, patience, or knowledge (nor should they) of how firewalls or bandwidth throttling works.
- nthj 14y agoI take responsibility for making my software behave the way users expect. I would expect other developers to do the same. This "well you should have known about obscure UNIX command X" stuff is both why software still sucks, and why business people make mega bucks while technical people are capped at $120K salaries.
- whaevr 14y agoThis. Under no impression from the Spotify website (although Im sure its buried in the T&C somewhere), or from what people say about it via word of mouth etc etc..what the application is MARKETED as; that it streams music to you for your listening expereince. All "well p2p saves them server cost, reduces latency etc" bullshit aside. No-one EXPECTS that of the application. Its deception. Plain and simple. A vast amount of users don't expect this of the application and that could lead to plenty of consequences unbeknownst to them. Plenty of good reasons have popped up in this thread (data plans being eaten, people with limits imposed by their ISP, work environment concerns) TL;DR Its negligent of spotify to market for one thing, and then include something like this in such a hidden and unmodifiable sort of way in their program. You want it in there? Fine. Tell me about it up front and give me some control over the upload speed
- zurn 14y agoThis kind of thing is key to getting mainstream acceptance for p2p. Eg some ISPs try to forbid use of p2p apps, it's important you can bring up Skype and Spotify and WoW as mainstream apps that use p2p and aren't reasonable to ban.
- pixie_ 14y agoIs there anyway to block the traffic that anyone knows of? I hate having to use 'offline mode' because my songs aren't scrobbled. Also as a paying user it's a kick in the teeth to have the client taking my bandwidth AND cpu while I'm not even using it. As a side note, Spotify has some of the worst community relations I've ever seen.
- RKearney 14y agoI just use my operating systems firewall to block Spotify from connecting to any IP address that isn't theirs. It results in you streaming music from only Spotify's servers and it prevents any uploads from your computer. I've found this to be the best solution.
- TobbenTM 14y agoNow to gamify it! Add statistics and allow users to control how much they upload. For every TB uploaded, one month free premium!
- recusancy 14y agoDoes anybody know if Rdio does the same thing?
- mavrc 14y agoNo. http://help.rdio.com/customer/portal/questions/32743-does-rdio-use-outgoing-bandwidth- http://help.rdio.com/customer/portal/questions/32743-does-rd...
- nm7 14y agoIf their excuse is that their servers can't handle it then they are jokers. Plenty of services without paying customers handle more bandwidth than Spotify. Why don't they do what Netflix does and use AWS? Forcing paying customers to participate in a p2p network doesn't make any sort of sense.
- seivan 14y agoNone of them are as fast as Spotify.
- Rayne 14y agoI've seen this argument a couple of times in this thread. I used to use Spotify and now I use Rdio and I do not see a difference in speed at all. What kind of speed are we talking about? How quickly a song starts playing? I've noticed no difference, and obviously the songs can't play faster.
- edgesrazor 14y agoI agree that rdio is the better service, but unfortunately since they dropped their free tier, I think most people will just grin and bear it with Spotify. Let's be honest - probably the majority of Spotify's users don't even know what upload bandwidth is, let alone why they should be concerned about it.
- seivan 14y agoI think Spotify is an amazing product, and there are research papers on how their system is implemented to give the fastest playback possible. It's incredibly snappy compared to the other alternatives. I remember trying Pandora when it was available here and it wasn't as fast as Spotify was (and still is).
- MikeKusold 14y agoDoes anyone know which ports this uses so I can apply QoS filters to it at a router level?
- glavata 14y agohttp://pansentient.com/2011/04/spotify-technology-some-stats-and-how-spotify-works/ http://pansentient.com/2011/04/spotify-technology-some-stats...
- pale_rider 14y agoThe two issues I have with this is: - They don't effectively communicate this with users. They do let people know, but you have to dig to find it. - There should be a paid tier where this can be opt out of.
- sahaskatta 14y agoThe Android app is horrendous for this issue as well. I have a Nexus 4 with the latest Android OS and the latest version of Spotify. I have yet to use the app even once this month. (I use Google Music.) The Spotify Android app has consumed almost 250 MB of data on WiFi and about another 100 MB on 3G/4G this month alone. Does anyone else have this issue? (For anyone that doesn't know, Android provides the data usage of each app in the settings panel.)
- allbutlost 14y agoThe android client doesn't use p2p.
- s4mple 14y agoDoes anyone know if the Android app uses p2p?
- allbutlost 14y agoIt doesn't
- rgo 14y agoDidn't know Spotify ran a p2p rig. Just wish they would give me some extra free minutes for having the damn thing up and running all the time back home... Anyway, quite entertaining to monitor its port traffic on my Mac: perl -e'while(1){%x=map{$_=>$x{$_}+1}grep/spotify/i,`lsof -i -P`;print for grep{$x{$_}<2}keys%x;sleep 1}' It seems to target peers geographically, which makes sense.
- thomas-st 14y agoMy main problem with this is that Spotify utilizes the full upstream bandwidth, causing the latency to go up dramatically on connections where the upstream is limited. If they were just a little bit intelligent and limited the streaming to 90% of the available bandwidth I'd be okay with it since that wouldn't affect the latency. Question: What is the best way to traffic shape all upstream connections on OS X? I've tried ipfw but I can't figure out a good way to e.g. limit the upload on all apps except for e.g. SSH.
- paxswill 14y agoIf you have a recent (>=10.7) version, pf [0] is installed. pf is a more capable firewall than ipfw, and can shape upstream connections in a number of ways. As an example of what it can do, the Network Link Conditioner [1] is built using pf. The version in OS X is not the most recent version in OpenBSD, but that FAQ is a good start, and the man page [2] can fill in the details. 0: http://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/ http://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/ 1: http://mattgemmell.com/2011/07/25/network-link-conditioner-in-lion/ http://mattgemmell.com/2011/07/25/network-link-conditioner-i... 2: http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man5/pf.conf.5.html http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwin...
- rvanniekerk 14y agoI run the little snitch firewall application on OS X and noticed this literally the first time Spotify ran (tip, EVERYONE running on mac should use this app, it's incredibly interesting to have a window into exactly what every application on your system is connecting to). It's almost laughable the amount of connections it attempts to make to outside clients. Anyways, the solution for me is simply to block all outgoing traffic to spotify that isn't directly to its streaming servers. Problem solved, no more outside peers eating up my upstream bandwidth.
- graup 14y agoIn terms of this being HackerNews: It is actually a pretty smart and economic idea to use P2P in music streaming clients. When I first heard about this, I was excited. Thumbs up, Spotify! Apart form that, that's really no news, you could read about that for years.
- sturmeh 14y agoI don't pay a subscription fee to download my music torrent style (without being able to access the files) only to be forced to seed it. It should be optional. (Not everyone has a very good upstream and unlimited bandwidth.)
- Rovanion 14y agoYour subscription fee would have to be a bit higher in order for that to happen.
- tharshan09 14y agoaha! so this is why spotify is not allowed at my work place.
- dnmtsn 14y agoDoes anyone know if the spotify Sonos app uses P2P?
- dinduks 14y agoI didn't know about this either. I just canceled my unlimited subscription because of it. (another reason was them updating their TOS, and showing the whole thing instead of showing only what has been updated; thus encouraging people to agree without reading — Not ethical at all)