Best Practices for Large Libraries…

I have over 700,000 track in my Roon library, when Roon is working well having a large library like this is fantastic using Roon’s music discovery attributes.

Unfortunately my Nucleus+ with 32Gb Ram doesn’t provide a great Roon experience.
I have an internal 4TB SSD for some of my music files and the rest on an external drive.

I love the Roon software but slowdowns, sluggish performance and crashes makes using Roon very frustrating.

I tried switching the core to my to my Mac mini (2018) 3.2 GHz 6-core i7 and found Roon to be quite faster. As this is my main machine (apart from my 2015 MacBook Pro) I couldn’t use it solely for Roon.

I’m looking for an affordable alternative (say $500A) that won’t choke with my large library.
Does anyone have a similar sized library with a success story and suggestions?

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Maybe a big noisy desktop hidden in a cupboard ? 700k tracks is a big library.

I used my i7 7700 desktop with 16 Gb for a long time with no issues, obviously there are bigger and better processors around and I would certainly go 32gb

The downside is the noise but if you can isolate it , mine was in the study nowhere near the listening room, its a good solution

@Rugby often has ideas on this subject.

Thanks Mike

My library is a bit more modest at 300k tracks.

FWIW, I’ve just set up Roon on a Intel NUC 13 Pro NUC13ANHi7 (12 core, 13 gen) running ROCK with a 250GB SSD. I started with the recommended 8GB of memory, and everything was sluggish with dropouts, and loss of server comm, etc. (even after 2 weeks - I don’t think it wasn’t just initial indexing load) So, I upgraded to 16GB, and eventually got to 32GB before things began to run somewhat smoothly. So, for a large library 64GB might be the best recommendation, at least in this application. Also an i7 level processor seems to be a good recommendation for a large library.

Imho, an i7 DESKTOP CPU is the goal for very large library. The i7 1300k desktop cpu is about 34% faster than the NUC version.

Just before Xmas I blew a whole pile of cash and bought an Apple Mac mini M4 pro with 64GB memory and a 2TB SSD for my Roon core. None of my music is on the internal SSD. I have 735,000 tracks which reside on a Oyen 20TB Novus USB-C external drive. Finally I have a Roon system for my large library which (usually) works without stalling and making searching painfully slow. I believe that when I can afford a faster internet service that my current 48Mbps/1, Roon will behave flawlessly.

… And still considerably more affordable than a Titan :wink:

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That’s certainly true and a Mac M4 is much easier to sell and can be re-purposed as a main computer too.

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What isn’t really, the servers over that price at least tend to have more custom parts and better quality components but are all firmly in Audiophile La La land.

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I’m currently on my 4th Roon Server. I went from a 2017 MacBook Air, to a 2014 MacMini, 2020 M1 MacBook Pro to my current Lenovo laptop.

All the Mac’s came with 8 gb of RAM and my Lenovo has 16 gb. My current library sits at just over 88k tracks/7.5k albums. The 16 gb of RAM in the Lenovo really makes the Roon experience a much smoother experience. It is running Linux as its OS and has an 8th gen i7 quad core CPU installed.

RAM seems to have a bigger impact on performance compared to which CPU is installed. As the Air and Mini both had i5 CPU’s installed. And for normal playback there were 0 performance issues when it came to playing music.

It seems that for over 700,000 tracks 64GB of RAM is required, I had 32 in my Nucleus+ and in my i7 Mac mini and Roon was sooo slow.

I reckon you could almost start your own streaming service with a 700k track library :wink:

But indeed with a library of that size 16 gb or even 32 gb of RAM just won’t do it.

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Sure wish a little more of this info had been in the instructions for ROCK, it would certainly have allowed me to make better choices/purchases initially and left me with a far better impression of Roon’s functionality in general.

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I have a library the same size and would be interested in knowing whether others have found the mac mini to be a better alternative than nucleus +

There are even more subtleties involved. How you have organized your library, and/or, the actual content of your library can affect performance and add to required resources.

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If I had oodles of cash to spare, I’d buy a Titan speked up to 64Gb of ram. So the Maci mini was my second option.

I run a 330K track library for a few years now on ROCK/MOCK on an ASRock mobo with fanless chassis and LMPS using an i7 10700 cpu with 32GB - same setup as was using Windows 10 prior to windows OS build crashing beyond recovery. its been rock solid.

My library is the same size and I’m using the Nucleus + with 32 RAM and I re-booted it last night after Roon was sluggish and it’s snapped to attention [not sure for how long]