Advantages of Roon Server (headless) vs regular Roon app

Simple question, really, but I’ll provide some details for context.

My Roon Core is running on a Mac Pro (early 2008, 2x 2.8Ghz quad-core Xeon, 6GB RAM) that’s in my basement, which runs headless - I connect only via Screen Sharing. I’m running Roon Server on it, the headless version of Roon, because why not?

Then I woke up this morning thinking (because I’m this kind of weirdo), what are the advantages of running Roon Server vs the regular Roon with the GUI front-end?

I thought it would be performance (as stated in the Roon Server KB article), but I did some memory/CPU comparisons, and when you add up all the components, it comes out to basically be the same in my tests. Even if I’m being generous, it wasn’t a major difference.

So, I’m wondering, what kind of performance difference should I be seeing?

p.s. More curious than anything (i.e. not a support issue). Not really having any problems, aside from noticing that after having Roon Server running for a couple weeks straight, it was using 1.5GB of memory vs the 320-360MB it uses normally (talking RoonAppliance, to be specific here).

TIA

From a tangible observable performance perspective, given your well specified server hardware I’d say it would tend towards zero.

The main advantage of Roon Server is that is headless and thus can run on machines that don’t support Open GL3, also it’s always on regardless of it the GUI is running on not.

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Thanks, @Carl.

I know it’s a separate thing, and you’re not support, but any insight on the memory usage increase? This normal? Anyone else out there seeing this?

I just restarted Roon Server, and will keep my eye on it over the next days/weeks…

Yes, I have RoonAppliance using the same amount of memory on my Mac mini running Roon Server.

May be you can find an answer/hint for a root cause here’re your memory question: