Basically the program isnt fit for purpose on Mac. Its a brand new mac with 700gb of space left and shed loads of memory!! It shouldnt be this hard to use ultimately. I didnt have to purchase a cache cleaner for my windows PC or other Apple devices. Spotify need to.
I turned my laptop today and noticed that any third-party applications (Chrome, Spotify, VScode, etc) was taking 30-90 seconds to launch. I tried to update to 10.14.6 (not upgrading to Big Sur just yet), but the symptoms are still there - slow third party application start. If you are still experiencing MacOS sound problems, AirPlay issues, or other audio conundrums, then apply any waiting updates to your Mac and wait for additional patches from Apple to fix problems. Well, I don't think it's my network connection. When spotify on my desktop is running beyond slow the other day, I took out my ipad, launched spotify and I was able to get right in and start playing. On the desktop, everything else (browsers, speed tests) were fine. It's definitely the spotify app.
Discover how we shortened the feedback loop of pre-merge verification checks for our iOS applications by up to 75%.
Who doesn’t love a continuous integration system that is stable, fast, reliable and feels transparent to its users? One of the missions of the Client Platform tribe at Spotify is to improve the continuous integration and delivery experience of our mobile apps. We are constantly trying to reduce flakiness and make builds as fast as possible to prevent the slow-down of daily development and releases.
In this post, I would like to explain how we are specifically improving the continuous integration experience by upgrading the macOS machines that we use to run builds. In the last few months, this allowed us to shorten the feedback loop of the pre-merge verification checks for our iOS applications by up to 75%.
Context
Up until 2019, we ran all our continuous integration builds for iOS apps on macOS virtual machines (on both 2014 Mac Pros and 2014 Mac Minis). This was really convenient since cloning the state from one machine to another was completely automated, i.e. during Xcode and major macOS upgrades. Multiple VMs usually run on the same machine and they also share a storage area network (SAN). Luckily, we don’t host the machines ourselves, but let experts do it for us. We use the macOS cloud provider, Flow Swiss, and have developed a good relationship with the team following years of partnership.
We slowly started to notice a steady increase in our build times and decrease in stability of our build machines as our codebases grew. By talking with other teams in the industry, we noticed that more and more teams were moving to a bare metal solution, which sparked our interest.
Going Bare Metal
In January 2019, we noticed that Flow added a mention of a new bare metal solution that they were working on to their website. The vision of this new product is the following: “Bare Metal Macs should be controllable and manageable like traditional virtual machines”. We didn’t want to completely lose the benefits of virtual machines, but we didn’t want to give up on our performance either. To better understand if switching to bare metal could help us shorten our build times and improve the performance and stability of our continuous integration system, we decided to run some benchmarks. Flow promptly provided us with two 2018 Mac Minis (3.2GHz 6‑core i7, 32GB RAM) for benchmarking purposes. We used a iOS Music client release build to benchmark the machines with all caching disabled (which we rarely do during normal development), to really test the worst possible scenario and put the machines under heavy load. We ran such a build every 2 hours for a couple of days to get some useful data and we quickly noticed an interesting trend. Builds on a 2018 Mac Mini were twice as fast, and a lot more stable.
Our main issue with the virtual machine agents was the variance of build times. Sometimes, the same exact build could take 50% less or more time, and it was unclear why. As previously mentioned, more than one virtual agent can run on the same physical machine, so our assumption was that this, along with the fact that all machines were reading and writing to the same SAN, was the bottleneck. The typical enterprise SAN has a I/O pattern that consists of 40% writes and 60% reads. Instead, our usage during peak hours was 80% writes and 20% reads. So we knew that there wasn’t much room for improvement by continuing to invest in virtual machines for our builds. We had to go bare metal.
As you can see from the graph, the build times on the bare metal machine look perfectly constant, which is exactly what we were expecting. If you compile the same codebase over and over again in a sandboxed environment, the build times should be consistent since nothing can affect the performance of the OS outside the compilation tasks of the build itself. Some engineers even looked at the graph and said: “The run times look suspiciously consistent on bare metal, it just looks almost too good to be true!” We were so used to the fluctuating build times of our virtual machines, but we knew this was the right choice to make if we wanted to drastically improve our macOS CI experience.
Over the following months, we kept in touch with Flow to be early adopters of the new offering given the results of our benchmarks. We started working on updating our tooling to work on the new hardware shortly after placing our first order for some new machines. We wanted to focus on improving builds that engineers care the most about: pre-merge checks. In the Spotify Music app repository, there are several checks that have to pass before changes can be merged to master, which in turn causes thousands of builds to be triggered every day. All these builds need to be completed as fast as possible in order to get new features and bug fixes in the hands of our customers quickly. We, therefore, slowly started to move some pre-merge configurations to bare metal, i.e. linting and static analysis, to test that our infrastructure was behaving as expected. Even though these configurations don’t perform any compilations, we still saw an improvement of over 30% in their duration simply due to the fact that they could make use of the full performance of these new, more powerful machines.
Install spotify premium for free. We estimated that 45-50 agents were needed to run all pre-merge configurations on bare metal, so for a few weeks, only some specific checks would run on bare metal, and thus, finish faster.
Even without fully running all our pre-merge checks on bare metal, we started to see some improvements. You can see from the above graph that the percentages for our configuration that builds an App Store version of the app all decreased. P50 decreased from over 16 minutes to less than 8 minutes. During this transition period, we used a data-driven approach with dashboards and alerting systems to make sure the quality of our service was not deteriorating.
The table above compares the duration of the same checks between October 1st and December 31st on both types of build agents. During this time, the same configurations could run on a virtual or bare metal machine, depending on availability. This allowed us to really see the improvement when running the same exact type of check.
As you can see, the biggest wins are in the unit testing configurations. By using bare metal, the iOS simulator is a lot more stable and we can run up to 6 simulators simultaneously (up from only 3 on VMs), along with a lot less flaky tests.
Conclusion
We couldn’t be happier with the results of our transition to bare metal machines, and the results really speak for themselves. We started with just a small benchmark that validated our hypothesis and we continuously gathered data and monitored the progress to help us make the right decisions as we scaled up the number of bare metal machines in our infrastructure. We are definitely looking to increase the number of bare metal machines we employ in our continuous integration environment and to completely sunset our virtual machines at some point in the future. Of course, our big gains came from moving to a much newer and more modern hardware, as well as getting rid of the virtual machine overhead in one go. https://pjvunxp.weebly.com/blog/does-spotify-premium-for-students-not-let-you-download-songs.
This effort has been possible in thanks to many squads in the Client Platform. We would also like to thank the Flow Swiss folks for their great help in this project.
If you think any of this work is interesting to you and you would be up to solving some interesting problems, check out our Join the Band page.
Please help!
Brand new Mac Mini (3 months old) is running extremely slow, right from booting up.
Crashed a few days ago and wouldn't boot back up (got to Apple progress bar but would freeze right at the end). Had to use safe mode and a fresh install of MacOS. Even after the fresh install, everything is running abnormally slow. Using hardly any storage and I'm not typically not opening more than Chrome and one or two other applications at a time.
From the EtreCheck Report (which took forever to run btw) I see some possible stuff with the Virtual Memory Information section that could be problematic and I suspect there may be some problems with the Adobe applications I have installed?
Not sure where to look or what the next step is. Any help would be appreciated.
EtreCheck Report
EtreCheck version: 4.0.1 (4A131)
Report generated: 2018-04-06 22:24:38
Download EtreCheck from https://etrecheck.com
Runtime: 15:06
Performance: Poor
Problem: Computer is too slow
Major Issues:
Anything that appears on this list needs immediate attention.
No Time Machine backup - Time Machine backup not found.
Minor Issues:
These issues do not need immediate attention but they may indicate future problems. 1.7 minecraft download mac.
![Spotify Spotify](/uploads/1/3/4/0/134074430/951729994.jpg)
Unsigned files - There is unsigned software installed. It appears to be legitimate but should be reviewed.
Hardware Information:
Mac mini (Late 2014)
Mac mini Model: Macmini7,1 Garmin 530 manual download.
1 1.4 GHz Intel Core i5 (i5-4260U) CPU: 2-core
Spotify premium download apk. 4 RAM Not upgradeable
BANK 0/DIMM0
2 GB DDR3 1600 ok
BANK 1/DIMM0
2 GB DDR3 1600 ok
Video Information:
Intel HD Graphics 5000 - VRAM: 1536 MB
Thunderbolt Display 2560 x 1440
Drives:
disk0 - APPLE HDD HTS545050A7E362 500.11 GB (Mechanical)
Internal SATA 3 Gigabit Serial ATA
disk0s1 - EFI (MS-DOS FAT32) [EFI] 210 MB
disk0s2 [Core Storage Container] 499.25 GB
disk1 - Macintosh HD (Journaled HFS+) 498.90 GB
disk0s3 - Recovery HD (Journaled HFS+) [Recovery] 650 MB
Mounted Volumes:
disk1 - Macintosh HD 498.90 GB (431.55 GB free)
Journaled HFS+
Mount point: /
Network:
Interface en0: Ethernet
Interface en4: Display Ethernet
Interface en6: iPhone
Interface fw0: Display FireWire
Interface en1: Wi-Fi
802.11 a/b/g/n/ac
One IPv4 address
Interface en5: Bluetooth PAN
Interface bridge0: Thunderbolt Bridge
iCloud Quota: 29.74 GB available
System Software:
macOS High Sierra 10.13.4 (17E199)
Time since boot: Less than an hour
System Load: 1.81 (1 min ago) 1.77 (5 min ago) 1.46 (15 min ago)
Security:
Versions | |||
---|---|---|---|
System | Latest | Installed | Status |
Gatekeeper | 138 | 138 | Mac App Store and identified developers'>Adware pattern match |
XProtect | 2099 | 2099 | |
Malware Removal Tool | 1.30 | 1.30 | |
System Integrity Protection | Enabled |
Unsigned Files:
Launchd: /Library/LaunchAgents/com.privateinternetaccess.osx.PIA-VPN.plist
Executable: /Applications/Private Internet Access.app/Contents/MacOS/startup.sh
Details: Exact match found in the whitelist - probably OK
Spotify Slow On Mac Mini Pro
System Launch Agents:
[Not Loaded] | 8 Apple tasks |
[Loaded] | 170 Apple tasks |
[Running] | 113 Apple tasks |
[Other] | 2 Apple tasks |
System Launch Daemons:
[Not Loaded] | 40 Apple tasks |
[Loaded] | 166 Apple tasks |
[Running] | 126 Apple tasks |
[Other] | 2 Apple tasks |
Launch Agents:
[Running] | com.adobe.AdobeCreativeCloud.plist (Adobe Systems, Inc. - installed 2018-02-21) |
[Loaded] | com.microsoft.update.agent.plist (Microsoft Corporation - installed 2018-03-22) |
[Not Loaded] | com.adobe.GC.Invoker-1.0.plist (Adobe Systems, Inc. - installed 2018-02-12) |
[Other] | com.adobe.ARMDCHelper.cc24aef4a1b90ed56a725c38014c95072f92651fb65e1bf9c8e43c37a2 3d420d.plist (Adobe Systems, Inc. - installed 2018-02-15) |
[Loaded] | com.privateinternetaccess.osx.PIA-VPN.plist (? 87063a21 - installed 2018-02-07) |
Launch Daemons:
[Loaded] | com.adobe.ARMDC.SMJobBlessHelper.plist (Adobe Systems, Inc. - installed 2018-02-15) |
[Loaded] | com.microsoft.autoupdate.helper.plist (Microsoft Corporation - installed 2018-03-22) |
[Loaded] | com.adobe.acc.installer.plist (Adobe Systems, Inc. - installed 2018-02-21) |
[Running] | com.adobe.agsservice.plist (Adobe Systems, Inc. - installed 2018-02-12) |
[Loaded] | com.adobe.ARMDC.Communicator.plist (Adobe Systems, Inc. - installed 2018-02-15) |
[Loaded] | com.microsoft.office.licensingV2.helper.plist (Microsoft Corporation - installed 2018-01-16) |
User Launch Agents:
[Running] | com.spotify.webhelper.plist (Spotify - installed 2018-01-26) |
[Loaded] | com.google.keystone.agent.plist (Google, Inc. - installed 2018-02-03) |
[Not Loaded] | com.adobe.GC.Invoker-1.0.plist (Adobe Systems, Inc. - installed 2018-02-12) |
[Loaded] | com.adobe.AAM.Updater-1.0.plist (Adobe Systems, Inc. - installed 2018-02-09) |
Internet Plug-ins:
Spotify Slow To Open
AdobePDFViewerNPAPI: 17.012.20098 (installed 2017-11-04)
AdobePDFViewer: 18.009.20044 (installed 2017-11-04)
QuickTime Plugin: 7.7.3 (installed 2018-03-27)
nplastpass: 4.1.7 (installed 2018-02-08) Apache tomcat-8.5 download for mac.
AdobeAAMDetect: 3.0.0.0 (installed 2018-02-21)
PepperFlashPlayer: 28.0.0.161 (installed 2018-02-08)
3rd Party Preference Panes:
Flash Player (installed 2018-02-01)
Time Machine:
Time Machine Not Configured!
Top Processes by CPU:
Process (count) | Source | % of CPU |
WindowServer | Apple | 7 |
kernel_task | Apple | 3 |
trustd (4) | Apple | 2 |
kextcache (2) | Apple | 1 |
mdworker (5) | Apple | 1 |
Top Processes by Memory:
Process (count) | Source | RAM usage |
kernel_task | Apple | 483 MB |
system_profiler | Apple | 310 MB |
Adobe CEF Helper (2) | Adobe Systems, Inc. | 129 MB |
Adobe Desktop Service | Adobe Systems, Inc. | 104 MB |
kextcache (2) | Apple | 91 MB |
Top Processes by Network Use:
Process | Source | Input | Output |
pia_upscript.sh | 71 MB | 3 MB | |
mDNSResponder | Apple | 56 KB | 28 KB |
netbiosd | Apple | 2 KB | 1 KB |
rapportd | Apple | 489 B | 429 B |
SystemUIServer | Apple | 0 B | 240 B |
Spotify Mini Player Mac
Top Processes by Energy Use:
Process (count) | Source | Energy usage (0-100) |
AdobeGCClient | Adobe Systems, Inc. | 4 |
WindowServer | Apple | 2 |
Adobe CEF Helper (2) | Adobe Systems, Inc. | 1 |
mdworker (5) | Apple | 0 |
mds | Apple | 0 |
Virtual Memory Information:
Available RAM | 1.24 GB |
Free RAM | 122 MB |
Used RAM | 2.76 GB |
Cached files | 1.12 GB |
Swap Used | 2 MB |
End of report
Mac mini, macOS High Sierra (10.13.4) Open spotify web app.
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