As the subject, why is Roon so resource hungry? An i7 or even i5 is overkill for a huge amount of applications or services - combined with an SSD and I could run an application server with an Oracle DB taking a few hundred transactions a second.
So is an i7 and SSD really required or can it be run on an i3 with a spinning platter? If not… What is the bottle neck?
DSP is about the size of it, I think.
Without using DSP, you can play any file on a basic setup.
In addition, some of the database actions (eg creating the sound wave profile) takes up resources initially.
I run my server using the ROCK kit on an i3 fanless computer with DSP and no problems. For example, upsampling will operate at around 20x speed and downsampling of a 128 DSD file to 176Khz 24 bit will operate at around 3.5x speed. So no issues really.
Also - I use a spinning disc 
Ahh ok… So it runs ok on an i3… That’s good to hear.
Perfect, thank you sir ! Good to know.
Weekend project, making a low spec server to store music and run roon… Cheered me up, im bored of spending decent money on computer hardware (that sits around idle most of the time)
Others are broke doing the same 
so be happy and enjoy, it can get very bad, very quickly!
Its criminal all those wasted CPU cycles… Should be a way of selling the off while the PC is idle.
I think that there are any number of apps that will contribute idle cpu cycles to the service of some common good, e.g. looking for NEOs, analyzing the human genome, etc.
A Google would probably turn up several opportunities.
Er, have you read this?
I feel like the best suggestion is “if it will run Spotify and iTunes, it will run Roon much much better.” On low spec hardware, if Tidal runs well (Roon runs better). iTunes runs…not great, but acceptably at best. Roon runs much better. If Spotify kind of runs but is a laggy mess, Roon runs circles around it. Maybe not if you have a massive library, but otherwise, Roon seems to outperform Spotify by a lot, iTunes by a notable bit, and Tidal slightly.
It uses OpenGL for the front-end?? What’s the back-end, Couchbase+Hadoop??? lol… No wonder its so processor hungry.
Number of simultaneous endpoint streams also factors into CPU usage.
Why no mention of GPU requirements? Roon is a GPU resource hog, which makes sense since one of Roon’s main features is its beautiful user interface and a large music library needs lots of GPU power to work quickly and flawlessly.