Memory Usage
Using the wonderful ps_mem tool, here’s the memory usage of Spotube compared to the other third-party Spotify clients.
Spotify TUI and spotify-qt rely on spotifyd to play the music streams. We’ve included spotifyd’s memory consumption in the above chart. Spotube, spotify-player and ncspot don’t rely on spotifyd.
As you’d expect, the memory footprint of Spotube is heavier than its console-based counterparts. But it’s also considerably less frugal with memory than spotify-qt.
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.
Again the memory figures for spotify-qt and Spotify TUI include spotifyd’s memory footprint.
Spotube consumes about 50% more memory than spotify-qt. In light of our findings, it’s hard to describe Spotube a lightweight client, but RAM usage may not be an important consideration to you.
All the third-party clients compare favourably 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 – Lyrics
Page 4 – Memory Usage
Page 5 – Summary