Yes, it's a problem. This is shoddy craftsmanship and shouldn't be acceptable to anyone.

It simply doesn't matter that SSDs will be ok. It's being wasteful of system resources. Software should not waste system resources.

This kind of "shoddy craftsmanship" has been the accepted way to produce software for a very long time, and the effects have until recently been hidden by Moore's Law. Wasted resources didn't matter because everyone with money to spend would throw away their old machines and buy new, faster ones. People working at the extremes -- data centers and mobile phones -- have to actually think about resource use; maybe this will make its way toward the center.

I'm not sure. On older machines it was more obvious where shoddy craftsmanship was as you had less resources to use. Now it is hidden a bit more but I never ever accepted it as the "accepted way" to produce software.

Others might have, but I don't think it was ever encouraged to write daft loops or short timers to write data.

It is interesting that the styles of writing code (eg doing dynamic casts at runtime a lot) has real impacts on performance and speed. Stroustrup wrote an interesting paper (must find it) where he encouraged static code generation rather than runtime dynamic checks all the time. It means we have to think a bit harder when designing software and writing it, but it is worth it for all our sakes (less CPU time to do the same thing, less power used etc)

I hope you don't work for an online publisher/advertiser. The amount of waste their software generates is absolutely staggering.

Yesterday I was working from home and trying to compile our codebase was taking an excessive amount of time. Still have a spinner in my home computer so I heard it working really hard even after I stopped the compile and noticed spotify slamming disk I/O. Killed it and everything went smoothly. So yes it can actually matter quite a bit.

16 years if that's the only thing writing to your SSD. Imagine if every piece of software did this, that is why it needs to be kept in check.

A few days (or a couple of weeks perhaps) ago there were similar posts about Chrome and Firefox, but in the browsers it was related to writing the metadata to reopen every tab and sesion back when you restarted the browser.

Firefox comes pre-configured with a time of 15 seconds intervals, that is, every 15 seconds it writes a few KBs of data just to reopen your session, no matter what' activity you're doing with the browser (or if doing nothing at all). At the end of the day it ammounts to a few GB's in writes, depending on your browsers usage.

So it's not crazy/paranoid/weird to asume that this is becoming more or less "standard" behaviour.

Wait, do you mean a few kb 4 times/minute (5760 times/day) which would be a few MB if you write kbs, or do you mean GBs per day? I don't understand...

IIRC "a few" == from 100KB to 1MB, which sums up to a few gigs.

I think the point here is that this is pointless process activity. Either a bug or something else. It's eating SSD write cycles, which is a finite resource, and providing very little if any benefit to the user.

And consuming IO, and consuming memory bandwidth, and consuming CPU cycles, and consuming battery. It is bad all around.

It is a bug, it should be fixed, it's unacceptable that it's taking so long. But tone of the discussion would be very different if this was simply "app is slow and drains battery". This is big news only because most people think Spotify will kill their SSD like by Christmas or earlier. When in fact it probably doesn't matter at all, because most computers get replaced due to natural causes in less than 8 years.

>This is big news only because most people think Spotify will kill their SSD like by Christmas or earlier. When in fact it probably doesn't matter at all, because most computers get replaced due to natural causes in less than 8 years.

From a test I've seen, SSDs can start showing issues at the 250TB mark. Wouldn't be a huge issue if Spotify were the only problem child, but remember when Firefox (and probably Chrome) were/are doing excessive SSD writes as well? And this past week, the League of Legends client was revealed to be too. If they all do 100GB per day like how Spotify does in this example, then your SSD could have issues after just under 2.5 years, which is nuts.

The above is a super rough estimate as Spotify usage will vary and how bad the League client and browsers are and how often people use those vary as well, but this could just be the beginning. What if Word decided to be SSD write heavy too? Or Adobe Reader? Or iTunes? Or whatever else it is people use.

Disk writes are not free from the point of view of the battery, either. Something with a much lower cycle lifetime.

Spotify clogs the write queue on my workstation (w/ssd), giving me 2 second freezes every 5mins or so. I don't know if it's this bug, but the disk write numbers and database file match, and the only remedy is exiting Spotify.