[Web Player] [Memory] [Chromium] Error: Out of Memory

[3dman8]

For a few weeks now, It seems that after some time the spotify webplayer crashes the tab, inducing an error "Out of Memory" and other similar errors. This may not be a spotify issue, however this allows for members of the spotify community to check to see if this issue is resolved, or otherwise indeed a spotify issue.

[Joan]

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out. Does this happen across multiple devices or only a specific one? If it's just one, what is the affected device? Consider clearing all cache and cookies, particularly that related to Spotify and trying again to see if the issue persists. 

Let us know how it goes.

[username0220]

Plan

Premium

Country

USA

Device

PC

Operating System

Windows10 

Chrome

My Question or Issue

This started a week or so ago where after playing music in the web player for an hour or two, the page would crash with an "out of memory" error. I tried clearing the cache with no luck. I always run it in its own Chrome window and generally minimized. I started monitoring the RAM usage in the task manager and the Chrome running Spotify would start at around 100mb then gradually increase to almost 1gb before crashing. 

I've been listening on this same device through the web player for 2+ years now in this same fashion with no issues until this started a couple of weeks ago. No recent updates to my PC. This is a work PC so unable to use the desktop app. 

Any advice?

[MartinT]

Hey @username0220, 

Thanks for reaching out to the Community. 

We see you've already done some troubleshooting to try and fix this. Have you tried opening up the web player through a different browser? Would that still affect your devices RAM usage? 

Keep us in the loop!

Cheers.

[username0220]

@MartinT,

I tried running the web player in Microsoft Edge, turned off the hardware accel, and any other possible memory hogs and it did the same thing - started at about 200mb and just slowly climbed until it crashed about an hour later. 

[username0220]

I tried going back to Chrome and it was staying around 200mb for the first 5-10 minutes or so then started climbing at about 3mb per 10 seconds with no interaction with that window at all (minimized). 

[Maria]

Hey there @username0220,

Thanks for the reply!

Just to confirm, does this only happen on your work computer, or are you experiencing similar behavior on your personal device? Keep in mind that sometimes work-related equipment may have some limitations due to internal company restrictions, which Spotify cannot influence, and these restrictions may affect the service's processing.

What you could try, however, is making sure your browser is up-to-date. You should be able to check and update this in your browser’s Help section. Another option is opening the Web Player in a private/incognito window to see if it makes any difference.

Fingers crossed this helps! Feel free to let us know if you need anything else.

[username0220]

@Maria

I think it's even worse in the incognito window. This is only after 30 minutes:

I have the app on my mobile device and have no issues there, only when listening through the web player. 

One thing I have noticed is that the memory usage jumps up significantly if I change playlists (screenshot above was after 3 playlist changes). If I just keep it on the same playlist that it opens up on, it seems to be a much, much slower increase in memory usage. 

Chrome is up to date: 

I turned on memory saver and turned off the pre-load page feature and with the page minimized, seems to be saying around 200mb. We'll see if this holds. 

[username0220]

Still no luck. I've also noticed that once the memory usage starts ramping up, if I expand the browser window that's running Spotify and then minimize it again, the memory usage will drop back down to around 200mb. That's without stopping the music or any interaction with the web player - simply expanding and minimizing the window its in. 

Odd behavior. Memory usage for my other open Chrome tabs/ windows stays pretty static. 

[Sutherlandon]

I haven't done as much troubleshoot as the OP but I'm having the same problem.  I'm using Brave browser, also chromium based, and yeah, it's super duper annoying to have to go back to the tab one or twice and hour and reload the whole page.  Something is memory leaking hard, and it's only Spotify that I'm having this problem.

[username0220]

I still have not been able to resolve this issue, just been having to reload the page every couple of hours when it crashes. 

[MihailY]

Hey folks,

Apologies for the late reply.

We'd like to forward this to our tech team, so please send us the names and exact versions of the browsers this happens with along with a screenshot showing the error message and/or the memory usage (if you haven't already).

Once we have this info we can investigate further.

Cheers,

[username0220]

This was after 37 minutes:

It has gotten worse a lot worse today.

[andreRaposo91]

Same problem on two different Win10 devices, browser is updated on both. Memory usage jumped from 1 to 1.7GB in less than 5min this time. Dropped to 300MB a few minutes after, but climbed again in the background after I started playing a different album. Saw it at 7.0GB once, on a 8GB system, and when I opened the tab the Out of Memory message popped up. It doesn't seem to be a problem when the tab is always open.

[huskerdev]

This is not hard to reproduce.  Literally open Spotify in any chromium web browser and play music.  It will crash with a memory leak after a while. Using the latest version of brave and it’s been doing this forever.

theres multiple reports of this going back to 2020 if you google.  Forward it to your devs and stop making excuses.

[huskerdev]

https://www.reddit.com/r/truespotify/comments/1ay9n3d/spotify_crashes_and_gives_me_out_of_memory_err...

[MihailY]

Hey everyone,

Thanks for sharing the requested info.

We've now forwarded this to right folks at Spotify. We'll let you know as soon as we have an update.

Cheers,

[ArrienRK2]

Jumping in to +1 here. This has been happening once or twice a day, but after a Chrome update this morning, it's happening every 15 minutes. Completely unusable right now.

[username0220]

This has also gotten worse for me over the last couple of days. I only get about 30 minutes of play time now before the out of memory error. 

[3dman8]

Hello everyone! OP here to bring an update to the situation. After asking around and as evident from the replies in this, I'm not the only one. And after running some experiments, I've concluded that this is a spotify issue and not a chromium issue.

My research
I tested Chrome for 2 weeks. Results: High memory usage that took a while for it to get to the point of crashing the tab.

I tested Brave for 2 weeks. Results: Extremely high memory usage, enough to crash the tab regularly.

I tested Edge for 2 weeks. Results: Cool as a cucumber, not reaching 1GB of memory usage. However I had much shorter listening sessions (less than 40min). Im currently testing for more than an hour to see if I would reach high memory usage... It did have a very slow increase in memory usage. I'm using this as my workaround currently. 

During my testing, I saw that the memory leak was only slowed when it was the current tab open. About enough to last approx 27min. If it was not the current tab, about an average of 13 min was the time it took to crash the tab.

Either one of two things happened:
1) As soon as I tried to reopen the tab, it crashed (music was still playing until I attempted to reopen the tab) with a memory error

2) It would just crash due to memory. Music stopped abruptly.

Types of errors:

"AW SNAP! error: Out of Memory"

"Error code: Out of Memory"

Unfortunately, it hadn't occurred to me to record the version of  Brave when I tested it, such a silly goose. However I did check to see if it was the most recent update at the time.  

Microsoft Edge Version 124.0.2478.80 (Official build) (64-bit)

Google Chrome Version 123.0.6312.58

Plan

Free

Country

USA

Device

Laptop

Operating System

Windows11 

Still waiting for an answer from Spotify!!!!