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Songbird's Memory Leak
I was hoping that Songbird's memory performance would significantly improve for version 0.7.0. I was sadly disappointed. On my Vista SP1 (x64) machine with 5GB of RAM, Songbird started at slightly under 100MB of RAM (which is too much). This wasn't the worst part. Opening a task manager, I could actually watch the memory usage increase before my eyes. Every 15-30 seconds, the memory usage went up a meg or two, until an hour later, when it was at 260MB. The memory use increases whether or not Songbird is being used to play music or not. When is this going to be addressed?!?!?
What makes this so painful is that I REALLY want to like Songbird. Its GUI's ease of use rivals that of iTunes, and the feature set rivals that of Winamp. Once the memory use is at a reasonable level, I will make it my main player in a heartbeat.
What makes this so painful is that I REALLY want to like Songbird. Its GUI's ease of use rivals that of iTunes, and the feature set rivals that of Winamp. Once the memory use is at a reasonable level, I will make it my main player in a heartbeat.
I’m sad
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Tell me when someone solves it.
The more people who report this problem, the more it gets noticed.
The more people who report this problem, the more it gets noticed.
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We're still, and continually, working on improving Songbird's memory footprint. It's not a problem we can solve overnight, but trust -- we're so working on it.
If you're interested in seeing exactly what we're trying to do to reduce the memory footprint, feel free to check out our development plans:
http://wiki.songbirdnest.com/index.ph...
This is work that we're doing right now for release next month. We'll come up with a new list of memory-related tasks for the release after this one, and those will also be visible to the world.
(Sshhh... we're going to replace this farting bird's 1GB memory cards with a 500MB memory card. Let's see if he notices.)
The company and 1 other person say
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This sounds like a slow leak during playback. I think MikeS has been working on this during the current release cycle. Could you please try a nightly build and see if that resolves the issue? (It's working fine for me here!)
Also, we have discovered that some of the add-ons out there really accumulate big memory usage over time. Please help us isolate which add-ons cause memory leakage by testing with no add-ons enabled.
The company says
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Hi guys,
just thought I'd check in. I think you'll find that memory usage is much improved in 1.0. There's will always be room for improvement, but we've made huge strides during the last couple of months and I think everyone who chimed in here will be able to appreciate the difference.
Also, HarmonicStyle, while there are still some rough edges, we're (gradually) working towards supporting 100,000 tracks in a Songbird library. At this point, I'd certainly feel very comfortable running Songbird 1.0 with 10,000 tracks or even substantially more. For those who try, the major slowness I'm aware of right now occurs when you try to delete thousands of tracks at once. I suspect you could probably create some Smart Playlists which would be pretty darn slow with that many tracks too.
I’m happy
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Inappropriate?not to mention that you, at least, should ask gently the developers to fix the errors.
they aren't at your service, they are trying to get you a great software for you For Free. And they're doing it the best they can, it's just people like you and me.
think better what and how to say next time.
I’m disgusted at the stupidity of some people ^2
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I agree with this entirely
I've read this whole thread and looked at the link below
http://wiki.songbirdnest.com/index.ph...
and can't help wondering why some Songbird users get so angry -
My comments weren't mean or nasty. They weren't personally spiteful. They are directed at the obfusication the developer is using in recommending an upgrade as a fix regardless of whether or not it fixes the issue.
According to the link the developer posted below they know / knew full well that it doesn't fix the issue.
(http://wiki.songbirdnest.com/index.ph...)
If they welcome people to use the software, they should also welcome criticism. I agree that I could be a bit more tactful, but I have a few glaring bugs with Songbird atm... besides the memory bloat issue it enjoys skipping dozens of songs at any given time for no reason. If I manually click "back" it will play any of the songs its skipped.
I guess being a software developer myself, I understand what 1.0 means. It means that bugs are fixed, the software is stable and that remaining items are new features.
This 1.0.0 release sure seems like a 0.7 or 0.8 release with major open issues that effect a large number of users.
There's a trust / understanding on what a version number means and how it is used... maybe Songbird views things a bit differently. Perhaps doing away with versions and/or moving to something like Ubuntu where you version your releases based on the year and month rather than anything else in particular would make more sense. -
I call bluff on Ryan being a software developer. He sounds more like a script kiddie troll.
If you were a software dev, you would understand that there are intermittent bugs that may unexpectedly present themselves throughout the development process and under an extreme programming model, the version numbers correspond directly to features presented in the road map (where bugs are entered as they're discovered).
If 1.0 implied a 100% bug free version, then you could argue that your vista laptop is still hovering at about 70%.
Openly abusing devs of open source software does serves no one but to make you look like an inconsiderate prick.
The only downside to the great work that these guys do under open source is that, open source is so free that banning disrespectful trolls like you from the community isn't even an option. I sincerely hope you take your spite back to iTunes and leave these people alone to do good work. -
Inappropriate?We're still, and continually, working on improving Songbird's memory footprint. It's not a problem we can solve overnight, but trust -- we're so working on it.
If you're interested in seeing exactly what we're trying to do to reduce the memory footprint, feel free to check out our development plans:
http://wiki.songbirdnest.com/index.ph...
This is work that we're doing right now for release next month. We'll come up with a new list of memory-related tasks for the release after this one, and those will also be visible to the world.
(Sshhh... we're going to replace this farting bird's 1GB memory cards with a 500MB memory card. Let's see if he notices.)
The company and 1 other person say
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Sounds great, I'm glad to see you guys are putting so much effort into it. Keep it up, it's paying off, at least in my eyes.
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Inappropriate?I downloaded Songbird 1.1.1a, Build 951 (prerelease). It is wonderful. The memory stands up to 68 MB while not playing anything and goes to 78 MB while playing. And I have added all my songs to my library (which I did not do the last time as it increased the memory tremendously). Also the importing of the songs to the library was muchhhhhhhhhhhh faster!! I was surprised. (although there were some things which have still to be fixed. One thing I was able to find was "Get album work" doesn't seem to finish its job at all) but I guess this is a direct effect of it being still a pre-release.
But my expectations are all high once again! thank you. I have added almost all addons that are compatible with songbird from getsongbird.com page.
thks again.
I’m thankful and excited
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Inappropriate?Hmm... sounds like good news! I currently have Songbird 1.0.0, Build 860. Do I have to follow a specific procedure to update it without losing the library information database? I mean those data collected while playing tracks, like number of times a certain track has been played, last time, etc etc
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Inappropriate?I think in the "live dangerously" page of getsongbird.com, they asked to run the installer with "songbird -p" to maintain your earlier profile and have this nightly build not bothering your earlier installation. I am not sure if this answers your question, but you could probably check here under "upgrading"
http://wiki.songbirdnest.com/Develope...
and more info here:
http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/P... -
Inappropriate?In addition, to this pre-nightly-release I see that, at the time the song is about the end, the memory shoots from 78-82MB to 91MB momentarily (buffering the next song on the playlist??) and then after say 10-15 seconds, reduces again to 65-72MB, and then constantly increases at 8KB/sec till the end of the song... This would be a solution for music, I guess or may be a smaller buffer in case of videos (if it were to be implemented)... but is this a permanent solution? Because, i always see CPU process of 5-10% while all other programs donot have so much oscillation in their memory under task manager.
I am not an expert in any of these things. I am just another frequent PC user. I am reporting, not complaining. Because, this seems promising. And these are very preliminary reports based on the last 2 days.I would also like to try the addons one by one (to check their individual effects) after the actual release of songbird 1.1.11 Comment Add a comment
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If it hovers at 5-10% while playing back a song that should be normal for a mp3 player. Most windows processes usually look like their doing nothing because they spend most of their existence sleeping, whereas an active mp3 player has to constantly chug along decoding and outputting the media. I remember when Winamp first came out, it used to use 50%+ on the slow PC I had at the time.
the 8kb/sec growth looks like they are buffering the track as it plays (much like a online radio stream). Maybe I'm wrong but they may have to do this to make the player seamlessly compatible with online streaming on sites through the browser. -
Inappropriate?Nothing wrong or broken here, but on the topic of memory footprint. Songbird is starting up and playing (with the album art add on) at 145 MB vs Windows Media Player 10. I know its an older version and has fewer tricks but it runs on my machine at just 14 MB. That is a huge savings in resource. I do like this program a lot. Is there a way to slim down? Just cant justify its hunger!
This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled
Huge resourse footprint???.
I’m hopefull
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Inappropriate?Is it normal that Songbird uses so much memory? On my system (Ubuntu 8.04) it uses more than 500MB. I have about 50'000 files (mp3 + ogg) in my collection.
And how can I tell Songbird to rescan and update my collection after I add files?
This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled
Why a so big memory footprint?.
I’m frustrated
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Inappropriate?I would like to see that Songbird uses less memory. As it stands at 1.0, it uses approximately 100 megs while iTunes uses only 35. It would definitely appeal to more people with older computers.
This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled
Use less memory.
I’m sad
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Inappropriate?Is something wrong with my Songbird? It's a memory HOG and is constantly freezing with well over 50 cpu usage. What's up? It's also caused my temps to surpass 80 celsius when I'm usually at 55. Only thing I'm doing differently is Songbird..
This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled
Songbird memory hog?.
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