Performance Issues When Too Many Speakers are Available

[burowyako]

Plan

Premium

Country

United States of America

My Question or Issue

I have a whole-home audio system with 30 to 40 devices that I can use with Spotify.  I understand that it's a lot of devices available, but with speakers in about every room of the house in addition to Google Home devices to accept voice commands, it isn't hard to get to that high of a device count.  A significant investment has been made in the hardware to support the whole-home audio system, and Spotify is the music service of choice that my family uses.

I noticed earlier this year that the Spotify app started to become very sluggish on all platforms that my family uses, including iOS, Android and PC.  Even when I just try to use the app on my phone without streaming the music to any other speaker, the app is almost unusable.

I have tried to troubleshoot this from the network side (Ubiquiti hardware) and with the amplifier manufacturer (VSSL), and I was informed that this is a new issue that they've become aware of.  Simply put, when the number of available speakers on the network dips below around 20, the app seems to be happy and runs fine.  Anything above that and everything comes to a crawl.

Some of the issues I'm experiencing are as follow:

1. Slow loading times
2. Major delays or complete failure in streaming music to speakers
3. Delays in pausing or skipping songs
4. The ability to connect to a speaker using Spotify Connect or Google Cast comes and goes without any changes on the network

I am more than happy to help collect log files and troubleshoot these issues in any way possible.  I love the Spotify service, but I really need to figure out this issue or use a service that can support my home setup.  YouTube Music, Apple Music and other services don't have this issue, and I wanted to confirm that before reaching out.

Please let me know what details are needed to help troubleshoot this issue, and hopefully it will help others as well.  Thank you!