Artist images very slow to appear

@brian I am not sure that the caching is working in my system using ROCK on i7 NUC? Eg on the artist page, accessed by iPad, the images do load but one can see the slow crawl as they do so, scroll down a few pages ensuring all current images load, more images load in a slow manner, scroll back up to the top and the artist images that had loaded moments before have to reload again very slowly. Same behaviour for album covers.

Where is the caching happening, core on ROCK NUC or on the client device?

I have a very modest collection of both local and Tidal albums yet the user experience is nowhere near the previous experience where images would load instantly using the same setup.

How can one confirm that the cache is working as intended?

(In UK with 37 Mbps VDSL broadband)

Thanks

John

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Thatā€™s good for you, but nowhere near the experience i am seeing.
I donā€™t see the same behaviour as @simon_pepper but the whole Roon experience has gone out the window for me also.

However, your points made in the explanatory post previously are all good. Now, how do we re-instate the whole Roon experience?
Because i get a helluva lot nicer browsing experience with my BluOS library or my Auralic Lightning DS library today?

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This caching in the application does not seem to survive closing and restarting the Roon client? At least, thatā€™s the behaviour I am seeing in Roon on Windows 11 working with a ROCK/NUC Core.

At the end of the day, I shutdown my Windows PC (the Core is on 24/7), and the next day when Roon starts up, it has to fetch all the album covers all over againā€¦ The initial browsing experience with the Album Browser after startup is not very thrillingā€¦

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Screen recordings

So the 1st and 2nd are listings of blank images under ā€˜Artistsā€™
The third is some navigating around artists, banner for Roxy Music does comes up, but the Album artwork lags, clearer when viewing Blur, no banner image, the thumbnail images that ages to show, the album artwork is blank, the caching does recover the banner image, then for Grace Jones, the thumbnails and album artwork lag, and then I click on composers and another screen of blank images.

This is not how Roon worked before this change, and is not indistinguishable from how it was.

I have found the image caching does not survive the frequent iOS app crashes experienced, nor day-to-day, so what is the cache lifetime?

Had a thought, perhaps if the new solution is to serve images to all Roon users globally in an on demand manner, do you need regional servers? One or two for the US, one for Europe and another for Asia?
I know the likes of Netflix, Amazon Prime do.

However all Roon users, by the very nature all have a Roon server, with attached SSD storage for the Roon Core database. Those with large and very large local libraries will have quite powerful servers, lots of memory and fast SSDs, it still better to utilise these available resources rather than building, deploying, optimising and managing a cloud based infrastructure to serve these on-demand.

My vote is for a pre-populate configuration option, with periodic updates to refresh the collected images over fully dynamic content delivery, so that Internet availability & cloud resource availability does not affects these.

Donā€™t get me wrong, I am an advocate of cloud computing. I put applications into an On-Demand/SaaS basis as early as in 2005, before the term Cloud was being used.
Today, the Products I manage are fully AWS deployed processing tenā€™s of thousands of Mobile Money transactions per day and millions of associated SMS messages.

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Brian mentioned in his post above that Roon Labs already use a Content Distribution Networkā€¦

But has it been duplicated on a regional basis?
It was just a thought.
I would prefer to have the images for the artists included in my library preloaded to my Roon Core server instead of a dynamical download process.
I already have Album Artwork for all of my locally managed library, and about 1,000 artist images I have selected and built for my own library, which are pre-loaded into Asset on startup, to be served in the Naim app.

Er - that is the whole point of a CDN. As the Wikipedia article I linked to states, a CDN:

is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. The goal is to provide high availability and performance by distributing the service spatially relative to end users.

Yes - but there are CDNs and CDNs! For all we know, Roonā€™s statement that they use a CDN may simply mean that they have 2 servers (one on the West coast of America and one on the East coast of America).

I may be completely wrong, but it would be nice to have some idea of the extent of Roonā€™s CDN.

Well I certainly donā€™t live next to a Cloudflare CDN server, and, apart from the non-permanence of local caching in my Roon client, I have no complaints.

What I was trying to get at with my question to @brian was, is local caching in the client permanent or not?

I know this might not be what some here want to hear butā€¦

On two WIN10 PC and my Antipodes Edge ( three Roon Core total), I have shut down and restarted many times.
Same with Android phone and tablet and iPad Mini4 remotes.
It appears that all images did indeed remain cached as once any Roon app reopened all album artwork was there instantly.

So there is something more going on here for sure.

And thereā€™s the rub - we should be trying to ascertain what the differences are in our systems and setupsā€¦ Why is it that I am not apparently experiencing permanent caching, but you (and presumably @brian) experience permanent caching and smooth browsing?

I too appear to experience caching for as long as my Roon server/core (on an 8i5 NUC) is left running. Whenever I restart or reboot my Core, album and artist image appear to require to be re-cached.

I donā€™t experience any significant performance issues such as some appear to have with artist and album artwork. However, I would still love to know why I have significant intermittent issues with missing metadata when using Roon Radio - see the following screenshots:

These are images taken from consecutive Roon Radio selections.

I canā€™t believe Iā€™m the only person who experiences this problem. Surely it has something to do with the way Roon handles DNS?

After albums and artists were fully cached on my iPad here, for the most part everything appeared as before for some days. However, the setup is now slowly caching both album and artist artwork again. I had hoped that first run through would be enough, but clearly not.
Iā€™m running ROCK on a NUC8i5, connected to a Netgear GS105, and everything here is wired (apart from the iPad, clearly!). I must admit to finding the experience quite disappointing when itā€™s slowly caching artwork all over again.

Michael

Well, troubleshooting this kind of cacheing issue given all the different potential configurations is not my idea of fun.

I too fall into the ā€œwow, it takes longer on startup to get to a good state than Iā€™d like but then is just as good, except once in a while it bogs down againā€ camp. Itā€™s useful to know that each remote is generating its own image store, so just because one remote is snappy the next one may not have downloaded. I think thatā€™s likely a smart V1 cacheing approach, though clearly there are some things wrong for some people.

@brian I do wonder how much pre-population / local cache-warming is possible in the backgroundā€¦ eg, start cold, let remotes pull what they need, but as you get data on which remotes are used the most, ensure that you have more coverage & more recent coverage for this remote dimensions (eg, ā€œI have an iPad that gets used all the time, that means that I should in the background keep downloading those particular images and make sure that theyā€™re up-to-date every 36 hours, but the windows remote is only used once a week and seems to mostly be used for classical, so Iā€™m going to keep the classical portion up to date every 36 hours and the rest of the catalog within 2 weeks, and if another remote type shows up Iā€™ll start downloading on the fly and lean how itā€™s used and then keep my cache up to date based on how I see it used ā€œ). Not sure that is a coherent strategy, but thought Iā€™d ask.

-j

For what itā€™s worth, hereā€™s a short video of the behaviour of Roon b831.

Itā€™s a much better experience.
Connected my ROCK (NUC8i3) and my iPhone 7Plus, neither updated yet. So this video is created just a few minutes ago.

So jealous you are still at B831 and none of the pain and lacking of a B88x upgrade.

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the time the last Roon release need to load album covers is a nightmare!
ā€¦ up to 5 sec (sometimes) to fill during a normal speed scroll

ā€¦ that happen on a system, NUC + Apple tablet, running from two hours (tube amplifiers heating up time) before being usedā€¦ 860 titles in libraryā€¦

ā€¦ and looking at the use experience every new release is worse then the previous oneā€¦ crazy

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Itā€™s is likely this is internet related, but that doesnā€™t make it an excuse. Customers cannot control their ISP and If the streaming suppliers own apps work and cache fine on the same ISP then this is likely down to Roons CDN being not as widespread around the globe. This may also explains why at times certain people moan about the poor speed of metadata loading and others are unaffected.

Quoting myself from a few posts upā€¦ What do suggest we should do @Jim_F , move to the US?