MPRIS commands are a bit slow

[Ape]

Description
MPRIS commands to spotifyd usually take aroud half a second, sometimes longer. I'd expect it to react almost instantaneously.

To Reproduce
For example with playerctl status

Versions

• OS: Arch Linux
• Spotifyd: 0.3.0-1 from Arch repo

[matbme]

Also worth noting that (at least for me) spotifyd jumps to 100% CPU usage during the delay and then returns to normal usage.

[robinvd]

i think every mpris command does a network request to the spotify api to get the info, so it makes sense it is slow. A better method should be made for this, either caching or preemptively fetch the info on song change.

@matbme Thats weird and definitly a bug!

[georgefst]

FWIW, it seems not to be all commands. I've found that Play and PlayPause (when it works: see #940) are virtually instant, but I'm seeing the half-second delay for others.

[bbergeron0]

Turns out playerctl might be at fault here.

MPRIS commands sent with dbus-send are instantaneous, but the same commands sent with playerctl are uncomfortably slow.

playerctl sends a DBus GetAll request before dispatching the actual MPRIS command, which queries all the properties exposed by the DBus interface (In this case, org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.Player), which spotifyd resolves with an obscene amount of HTTP requests.

Maybe spotifyd should implement a workaround for GetAll, maybe playerctl should stop dispatching useless requests, you decide ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

In the meantime, users can substitute playerctl with dbus-send (Don't forget to replace $PID and $COMMAND):

dbus-send --print-reply --dest="org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.spotifyd.instance$PID" /org/mpris/MediaPlayer2 "org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.Player.$COMMAND"

[eladyn]

Thank you for the investigations! I did a small write-up about the current state of things in spotifyd, which might shed some additional light on what is happening behind the scenes here. Nothing that will solve your problems, unfortunately. ;)

[bbergeron0]

I have to correct myself; playerctl's GetAll requests are actually necessary and serve the purpose of finding which DBUS applications are MediaPlayer2 instances.

[elken]

In the meantime, users can substitute playerctl with dbus-send (Don't forget to replace $PID and $COMMAND):

dbus-send --print-reply --dest="org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.spotifyd.instance$PID" /org/mpris/MediaPlayer2 "org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.Player.$COMMAND"

I can also confirm this behavior, so for now I've done the same using the below as a template:

dbus-send --print-reply --dest="org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.spotifyd.instance$(pgrep spotifyd)" /org/mpris/MediaPlayer2 "org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.Player.PlayPause"

[DaitiDay]

I have the same problem, but the delay is around 4s (yes, it's really annoying). Even using dbus-senddo not solve the problem. Any update on this?

Edit: I should have mentioned that I'm on arch and I'm using the spotifydpackage from the extra repository (v 0.3.5)

[eladyn]

We're mainly waiting for a librespot release here, since then we'll get access to all necessary information to dispatch commands locally.