A Roon on (Synology) NAS Primer

Good write up. A few things I’d add:

  1. Docker containers on Linux are not a “virtual machine”. This is a common misconception, but it’s just utilizing something called “Linux namespaces”. Basically what this means is that the overhead of using a Docker container on Linux is basically 0.
  2. I’ve been running Roon on my DS1621+ for over a year and I have had some stability issues which appear to be Roon related. TL;DR: the solution is to add user-defined “boot-up” script in Task Scheduler:

/sbin/sysctl -n -w fs.inotify.max_user_watches=65535

What this does is increase the maximum number of file change notifications to 64K. In my conversation with Roon support, it seems like Roon can use a very large number of these file notifications, but Synology for some reason defaults to a relatively small value. My other Linux boxes default to a much higher value like this.

If you want to check your value, run the command: /sbin/sysctl fs.inotify.max_user_watches

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