What app are you having the slowness issue with?
· Roon
What kind of performance/speed issue are you experiencing?
· Tracks take a long time to play
Please try to reboot your Roon Server
· Yes, rebooting helps, but the issue returns after some time
Please try to reboot your networking gear (Router/Switches/etc.)
· No, the issue is still the same even after a reboot
Is there any change in behavior if you try to navigate to Roon Settings -> Library and set both Background and On-Demand Audio Analysis to Throttled or Off?
· No, the issue is still the same
Does the issue happen on multiple Roon Remotes (controllers) or just one?
· Issue happens on multiple remotes
Router Domain Name System (DNS) change
· I was able to change my router's DNS servers but it did not help
What is the operating system of your Roon Server host machine?
· Linux Server (Ubuntu, Fedora, ArchLinux...)
Timestamp of issue occurrences
· All times below are local Pacific time (UTC-7). My RoonServer logs timestamp in local time. May 24, 2026, 9:56:02 PM — the worst event. A 24/176 hi-res stream delivered only 2327 kbps against a 7051 kbps requirement (33%), which triggered a sustained buffer starvation — "[prebuffer] sleeping in read" began firing at 9:56:05 PM and continued for nearly three minutes. There was also a related stall three minutes earlier at 9:53:06 PM (5086 kbps vs 7051 needed), and at 9:30:52 PM a stream collapsed to 545 kbps against an 1124 kbps minimum. May 27, 2026 — by far the worst day, with stalls clustered across the morning and midday: 7:29–7:31 AM — a single track (ti/4F653CAE) degraded continuously for over a minute, sitting around 4968–5516 kbps against a 7349 kbps requirement the entire time. 10:09 AM — another sustained degrade (ti/63C1357E), declining from 6405 down to 5905 kbps over roughly a minute. Further events at 11:58 AM, 12:00 PM, 12:24 PM, 12:29 PM, 12:48 PM, 12:52 PM, and again at 4:29 PM, 4:41 PM, and 4:58 PM — all hi-res, all under the required bitrate. May 31, 2026 — 5:08:49 PM (2876 kbps vs 5929 required, 48%) and 5:25:54 PM (5437 vs 5925). Every one of these is a hi-res stream (24/96 and above) from the CDN host lgf.audio.tidal.com. CD-quality and 24/48 streams play without issue. I can provide the full log extract on request.
Describe the issue
Hi,
I've been chasing intermittent stalls on hi-res TIDAL playback and I've narrowed it down enough that I think it's a CDN/peering issue on your end rather than anything local, so I wanted to hand over what I found.
My setup is a bare-metal RoonServer on wired gigabit, fiber internet (WAN sits at ~3.6ms RTT, 0% loss), DNS-over-TLS to Cloudflare. I've ruled out the local side pretty thoroughly — plenty of RAM and CPU headroom, clean NIC with no errors, sub-millisecond LAN, and the connection saturates fine on large direct downloads.
Over the last 7 days my logs show 69 "poor connection" events, and every single one of them is from the same CDN host: lgf.audio.tidal.com. Nothing from any other host. They're almost all on 24/176 and 24/192 FLAC — CD and 24/48 streams play perfectly. A few concrete examples:
- May 24: a full buffer starvation — "[prebuffer] sleeping in read" fired 523 times over 2 min 54 sec on a hi-res track, throughput sitting around 48% of what the stream needed.
- May 27: 31 separate poor-connection events in one day (by far the worst), all hi-res, all from lgf.audio.tidal.com.
- Worst single event in the logs: 2327 kbps actual against 7051 kbps required — 33% of minimum.
- Tonight (May 31): two more, 2461 kbps (80%) and 2694 kbps (44%), both on 24/176 FLAC.
The pattern's consistent: the edge node serving me just can't sustain the bitrate for 176/192k FLAC, while everything below that is fine. Looks like a peering or edge-routing problem specific to that node.
Could you enable diagnostics on my account and/or move me to a different TIDAL edge endpoint? Happy to pull exact timestamps for any of the above or reproduce on demand — just let me know what's most useful.
Thanks
Describe your network setup
Ziply Fiber, fiber, 2 Gig.
Topology: fiber ONT → pfSense firewall/router (running 2.8.1-RELEASE on a Netgate/custom box).
RoonServer runs on a dedicated bare-metal Ubuntu machine, wired gigabit (no Wi-Fi in the path to the Core). pfSense handles DHCP and DNS for the LAN; DNS is set to forwarding mode with DNS-over-TLS to Cloudflare.
Relevant measurements: WAN gateway RTT ~3.6ms with 0% loss; LAN latency to local endpoints is sub-millisecond; the Core's NIC negotiates gigabit full-duplex with no interface errors and effectively no dropped packets under load. Direct large-file downloads saturate the connection normally, so general throughput and the local network are healthy.
Endpoints are a mix of wired and Wi-Fi RAAT/AirPlay zones; the affected playback is on FiiO Q3 in the Family Room Zone, which is wired.