Hardwired NUC to PS Audio DirectStream DAC.
Trying to figure out why Roon wouldn’t be improved in performance with 16GB vs. 8GB.
Who says it won’t?
Well, it as usual with computers and systems, all depends. Generally speaking, if your Roon processing needs are covered by 8 GB, then the extra RAM will not be of much use. I personally don’t think it would hurt things, you’d only have spent some extra money and be using marginally more energy in exchange for some perceived “future proofing”.
Now, things like OS might change this. Are you using ROCK or Windows.
If ROCK, then Roon won’t really make use of the extra RAM until you hit about 200k, but, the post Ged linked says it better from Danny.
If Windows, then RAM is used for many other things besides Roon and Windows always loves extra RAM. Also, Windows is running extra stuff which takes RAM. So, if a Windows environment, then go for the 16. Whether or not you’ll notice any real use benefit depends on what you are doing.
Is there any distinction between tracks on the HD and those saved from Qobuz/Tidal or do they both count?
All the same,.
Do you mean Qobuz/Tidal tracks you’ve added to your library?
Roon uses the same database resources whether the file in your library is local or streamed. Once you’ve added something to your library, the database creates/tracks all the associated objects. So, if you have 10k local tracks and 150k streamed tracks in your library, for Roon that would be a 160k track library with all the associated CPU and RAM needs for 160k tracks.
Got it thanks
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I have about 125,000 tracks, and I’m planning on using ROCK on a NUC i3.
Just so you know, Roon recommends their Nucleus+ for libraries over 100,000 tracks. That is an i7 CPU.
I’d bet the i3 will be okay, but just FYI.
Right. I’ll find out. I bought the i3 used, to replace a MacMini. I never use any DSP.
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Because Computers! 
Roon uses some amount of directly allocated memory. On my Roon Core (with a fairly small library), this is about 1.2-1.5GB of RAM. This number doesn’t really change. It fluctuates between 1.2 and 1.5 based on how many zones are concurrently playing, and thus the in-memory buffering it does for each zone. But the bulk of that memory (I presume) is what it loads from the database to facilitate searches/etc. So unless I go and add a ton of tracks to my library, it just isn’t going to grow. It never goes above 1.5, even when Roon has been playing to multiple zones for weeks. So extra RAM isn’t going to help, since Roon just doesn’t need it.
Any extra RAM in the system will get used as block I/O cache. I see on average around 2.5GB of block I/O cache in use on my Roon Core. This will be from songs I’ve played, and I am guessing also things like artwork files that I doubt Roon keeps in memory all the time, but instead reads in when it needs it.
So all in, my Roon Core (which is running on a dedicated Linux system) consumes less than 4GB of RAM, even after it’s been running for weeks. (FWIW, a lot of what I listen to gets played from Qobuz, so aren’t coming from local storage and inflating the block I/O cache.) The system, since it’s a rackmount server, actually has 32GB of RAM. And it’s all just sitting there in the free pool, completely unused.
So yea, unless you are one of those folks with a library with 300k+ tracks, you won’t see any benefit to >8GB of RAM. Roon just doesn’t need it to perform. (Assuming the system is dedicated to Roon. If you are also running other services on it, then depending on how RAM-hungry they are, you might see benefit from additional RAM.)
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