Last Updated on February 21, 2023
Memory Usage
Using the nifty ps_mem tool, here’s the memory usage of spotify-player compared with its CLI counterparts ncspot and Spotify TUI. We’re also showing the memory usage of spotify-qt which sports a graphical user interface.
Note that the memory usage figure for spotify-player is based on the AUR package. By including image and lyric support, we see a slightly higher memory footprint of 49.7MB.
Spotify TUI and spotify-qt rely on spotifyd to play the music streams. We’ve included spotifyd’s memory consumption in the above chart. spotify-player and ncspot don’t rely on spotifyd.
Bear in mind the semi-official Linux client weighs in at 185MB of RAM at startup.
Obviously, memory start-up figures aren’t representative of actual memory usage when using a client over a period of time. From a pre-defined action including searching, playback of many albums, we capture a more representative figure for memory usage in the chart below.
The memory usage reported for spotify-player is based on the AUR package. By compiling lyric and image support, the memory footprint is 93.5MB.
Again the memory figures for spotify-qt and Spotify TUI include spotifyd’s memory footprint.
All the third-party clients are very lightweight compared to the semi-official Linux client which hogs a whopping 726MB of RAM.
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Memory Usage
Page 4 – Summary