
Why is Spotify chugging upload bandwidth when it is not streaming? - whaevr
http://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Windows/Why-is-Spotify-chugging-upload-bandwidth-when-it-is-not/td-p/70367
======
bobsy
I 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.

~~~
path411
I'm mostly shocked at how I simply was uninformed that spotify was using my
connection so. I know over the past few months I've had occasional and even
sometimes frequent spikes of latency while gaming.

I'm often left confuddled at these spikes as I won't have anything open I
would consider requires much bandwith. Also, even though I would have high
latency, opening a browser and navigating through sites would work as smoothly
as ever.

Now I know to look at spotify specifically and I would not be very surprised
if my spikes of bad internet activity are a result of spotify leeching my
upload.

While I think it makes sense for spotify to use p2p in their system, I would
have thought there would have been an indication of it in the options with an
option to disable such services.

~~~
easy_rider
I agree. I've been promoting spotify in word of mouth to my Friends. My co-
workers all use it, which means a good chunk of our upstream bandwidth is
swallowed by spotify? In any case they're being completely shady about it.
I.e. not making any effort to define Spotify as a P2P service. Understandable
in a marketing sense. Ethically questionable and actually upset since well. I
pay a monthly fee and all..

------
darrenkopp
I 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
Even at a 128KB/s fixed upload, that is still ~2x as much as my upload speed
limit on UK ADSL.

~~~
apawloski
Is that a typical speed limit in the UK?

~~~
citricsquid
Not 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.

------
nthj
I 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
Internet 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.

~~~
nthj
I 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
This. 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

------
lmm
May 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
Apologies for that, this is my first submission to HN

~~~
kintamanimatt
What was the original title?

~~~
whaevr
"Oh hey Spotify, sure use ALL my upload bandwidth" Hah.. c:

~~~
sturmeh
Yeah let's not do that again. :)

------
mcculley
I 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
What 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.

~~~
ryandvm
> it gets flagged in our security monitoring tool. And when it gets flagged, I
> have to make that action stop

Or... get your security monitoring tool to stop reporting legitimate P2P
protocols as a security threat.

~~~
freehunter
"Legitimate" p2p protocols depends completely on your risk appetite and how
you define your security. For us, our risk appetite is quite low, and there is
no such thing as a legitimate p2p protocol.

------
zurn
This 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.

------
TobbenTM
Now to gamify it!

Add statistics and allow users to control how much they upload. For every TB
uploaded, one month free premium!

------
nm7
If 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
None of them are as fast as Spotify.

~~~
Rayne
I'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.

------
skreech
Would 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?

~~~
nicholassmith
It 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'.

~~~
jlogsdon
Yeah, and everyone reads those.

~~~
nicholassmith
Well, you are kinda meant to read them. If you say you've read and agreed to
something you don't have much scope for whinging.

------
crazygringo
What 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?

~~~
MetricMike
[http://superuser.com/questions/135719/windows-program-to-
lim...](http://superuser.com/questions/135719/windows-program-to-limit-
bandwidth-of-other-programs)

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>) is the OSX (10.7+)
analog.

~~~
adrinavarro
Sadly 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).

~~~
j_s
Found this on its page, though I don't have the chance to check it out:

    
    
      > monitor applications connections , block outbound connections
      > to unwanted services (block chat, p2p...)

------
pfortuny
It 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.

------
recusancy
Does anybody know if Rdio does the same thing?

~~~
mavrc
No.

[http://help.rdio.com/customer/portal/questions/32743-does-
rd...](http://help.rdio.com/customer/portal/questions/32743-does-rdio-use-
outgoing-bandwidth-)

------
rgo
Didn'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.

------
kmfrk
Blizzard's abhorrent P2P torrent client does the same, unless you uncheck some
default settings in it. Just ridiculous.

~~~
sturmeh
At least you can turn it off in Blizzard's client.

------
seivan
I 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).

------
taylorbuley
I 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-u...](http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2011/04/how-dropbox-sacrifices-
user-privacy-for.html)

------
rvanniekerk
I 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.

------
thomas-st
My 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
If 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/>

1: [http://mattgemmell.com/2011/07/25/network-link-
conditioner-i...](http://mattgemmell.com/2011/07/25/network-link-conditioner-
in-lion/)

2:
[http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwin...](http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man5/pf.conf.5.html)

------
calstars
Do the mobile clients also use P2P?

~~~
dromidas
mobile 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
If 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.

------
sahaskatta
The 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
The android client doesn't use p2p.

------
rmrfrmrf
Surely people here know how to shape their bandwidth...?

~~~
to3m
At 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
Which OS are you running?

------
pixie_
Is 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.

------
edgesrazor
I 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.

------
dinduks
I 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)

------
graup
In 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
I 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
Your subscription fee would have to be a bit higher in order for that to
happen.

------
RKearney
I 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.

------
glavata
[http://pansentient.com/2011/04/spotify-technology-some-
stats...](http://pansentient.com/2011/04/spotify-technology-some-stats-and-
how-spotify-works/)

------
pale_rider
The 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.

------
mmuro
I ditched this service when they paused ads while I muted.

~~~
beaumartinez
Seriously? 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
The ads on spotify really are unacceptably annoying imo.

And it's not like spotify is the only way of getting music for free

------
waterlesscloud
It'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.

~~~
ta123987
Trickle could be useful for you:
<http://monkey.org/~marius/pages/?page=trickle>

~~~
waterlesscloud
You know, that's a good idea. Thanks for bringing that up!

------
pixeloution
Not 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
Go 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>

Thats from this morning

------
luser001
I use Spotify on Ubuntu Linux.

Looking into how it behaves there.

~~~
threedaymonk
It might be worth trying to run it through trickle to limit the allowed upload
bandwidth.

<http://monkey.org/~marius/pages/?page=trickle>

[Edit] I see someone else has linked to trickle above.

~~~
luser001
Awesome. Ubuntu even has packages for this. Thanks for the tip!

------
iamben
If you're using premium, why not just download the albums / playlists you want
and set Spotify into 'Offline Mode'?

~~~
doktrin
That'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
Sure - I'm not saying it's the solution, just an option if it really bothers
you.

------
MikeKusold
Does anyone know which ports this uses so I can apply QoS filters to it at a
router level?

------
s4mple
Does anyone know if the Android app uses p2p?

~~~
allbutlost
It doesn't

------
tharshan09
aha! so this is why spotify is not allowed at my work place.

~~~
dnmtsn
Does anyone know if the spotify Sonos app uses P2P?

