When all music lives in NAS, what is the best practice to have Roon Server to pickup newly added music, reliably each time without force scan/restart Roon Server?
The probability of Roon Server picking newly added music is ~100% right after starting the Roon Server. And when it picks up the new music, the time to do that is rather “quick”, since as soon as i add the music the Roon’s “library wheel” starts to spin.
Then as days go on for the Roon Server uptime, adding new music to NAS servers do not get picked up by Roon Server, i.e. the “library wheel” does not move for hours. As a workaround either restart Roon server. Or, force rescan of that particular NAS storage. Either of this works since re-scanning takes care of picking up the new music.
Please, is there a KB that describes what the best practice(s) is/are to allow Roon to add new music to its database that is timely with new music added to NAS servers?
I don’t know how Roon picks up new music from NAS under the hood (i.e. watching for new additions in real time) but perhaps there are few things if i knew can help troubleshoot my situation.
I will make a comment about this, i.e. this NAS box, NAS-EA-C1-4F, i don’t know if the # of tracks there being lowest has anything to do with my observation, but adding music to that NAS box has ~100% chance of Roon pickup new files in real time. And show them in Roon client. But the other 3 NAS boxes, not so good. The network connectivity and computing power behind all these NAS boxes are very “good”. But again, i don’t know what is “good” enough for Roon to reliably pickup new files from NAS in real time. Or, if there is way to diagnose, troubleshoot when Roon “misses” adding new files in real time to its database when the same music files are added to the NAS.
Maybe # of directories at a given level has a role to play, eg. ~4,934 directories at the top of the storage folder is not a good practice?
Despite any “Watching for new files in real time” message, you will not get that with a MyCloudEX2Ultra. It all boils down to SMB implementation, and that interaction with the server varies from NAS to NAS.
I never have had it work with a MyCloudEX2Ultra, and honestly, that is the preferable result. Real time watching is overrated because it is far more likely to cause partial imports, split albums, and/or identification mishaps.
Just hit “Force rescan” when needed. Doing so with 100,000 files takes all of a minute. Big whoop.
Or just wait until the additions get picked-up by Roon. Roon Labs knows that NAS devices are unreliable in reporting changed files / folders and does therefore a scheduled re-scan. You can look-up/change the time interval in a storage location’s settings (for network shares only).
No and because of what I have written above and this is a NAS issue and every NAS OS may need a different way to deal with it, this is unlikely to ever happen. Look for a solution for your NAS online (search for: “inotify max_user_watches”).
Increasing the max_user_watches to a value above your current and planned future size (counting files and folders) of your Roon music library size should fix the real-time watching. This I consider “tinkering” as most/all NAS OS don not provide a way to set this via their UI. Please also note that there is a reason for the default being 8192 and not just a quintillion or all files and folders. Increasing this value may lead to (other) issues surfacing on your NAS as the real-time watching costs resources. I suggest you learn how to live without real-time watching, given the size of your library, instead of tinkering and risking to loose all the data on the NAS in the worst case because of it.
@George_Shin - I’ve moved your post and thread from Support to the Roon Software Discussion category of the forum, since this is not a question for the Support team to respond to. I see that you have answers from the Community already.
I’m okay with above recommendation as well. I do not add music all the time and when i do, done in “batches” so manual force rescan is acceptable workaround the WD MyCloud NAS boxes.
What about at the Roon Server side though, because i don’t see a way to “disable” real-time watching of new files. Can i help Roon save some resources by disabling this real-time watching for new files from the Roon Server side? Or, that watching resource cost is all at the NAS server, which as suggested i’ll leave to whatever the default setting is/are.
I don’t see a way to disable watching for new files in real-time, at the Roon Server, if Roon is polling is what it is doing in background.
There is nothing to save here on the Roon side because it is not something Roon does. It’s a service offered (or not) by the OS it runs on or the NAS it is connected to. I don’t see a reason nor do I recommend tinkering around with the OS and its settings, local or on the NAS, to disable this service if provided. You could in theory solve it on the NAS side by restricting supported connections to SMB v2 but again I don’t see why you would want to restrict all the connected (to the NAS) devices from using the benefits/improvements of SMB v3 just because of an optional sub-feature of it (that relies on a given feature of the NAS OS being present).
Your last picture is of the setting I told you about:
That is actively looking for changes to the files (polling if you want to call this so) and has nothing to do with real-time notifications about changes which is an OS service (that Roon subscribes to if offered).
