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For some time, I've been testing with Google Play Music All Access. It works perfectly on my phone, but I have a very annoying issue on my laptop.

It seems that when I'm just browsing or developing software, my music plays just fine. However, when I'm compiling my code and the CPU usage rises to 100%, the music lags/stutters quite often. As soon as the compiling is done, the music plays just fine. I've tested with the most recent versions of Chrome (36.0.1985.125), Firefox (31) and IE (11). I also tried using HTML5 instead of Flash, but that doesn't help.

I looked into Task Manager, and I noticed that my RAM usage is about 8-9GB (mostly because of 2 databases and my IDE running) and my disk queue length is constantly <1.

I should also mention that I also use Spotify (web and desktop app), and I usually stream internet radio through a website. When I listen to music using Spotify or this streaming website, the music doesn't lag at all, even when my CPU usage is 100% while compiling. This leads me to believe that the laptop should be able to play my music without stuttering.

Specs of the laptop:

  • Intel Core i5 2410M
  • 12GB RAM
  • Intel Graphics HD4000
  • Samsung 840 256GB SSD

The laptop is running Windows 7 x64 SP1 with the latest updates and I use Netbeans as my IDE.

Is there anything else I can try?

Edit
I am sure, CPU is not throttling due to heat. Its temperature is at normal levels (50-60 degrees Celcius).

Ĭsααc tիε βöss
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Stefan
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2 Answers2

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It sounds like an affinity problem; your computer is putting priority higher on other processes, leaving Google Play music (inside the web browser) starving for CPU cycles. I doubt it's anything to do with thermal throttling. You could look into setting either the specific Chrome process thread that's running GPAA to a higher-than-normal priority in the Task Manager; I believe this will clear up your issue. Assuming you want to do this automatically every time you launch Chrome, you could use some software like Prio to handle this for you automatically. I'd wait to do that until you're sure it resolves your issue.

On the other hand, you could just set Netbeans to a slightly LOWER priority, as that might be easier to test. That way, Chrome should get the cycles before Netbeans if they're both competing.

As an aside, I've noticed high CPU usage with GPAA in general, so that might explain why it struggles but your other streaming browser site works fine.

jski
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In addition to jski's answer, I noticed that Google released a 64-bit version of Google Chrome 37 (it probably existed longer in the beta channel, but I never noticed/tried it). I just tried using this with Google Play Music (without any adjustments to affinities or anything) and it seems to work fine, even with 100% CPU usage because of compiling software (or other heavy tasks).

Stefan
  • 143