I’ve been having similar problems, a link to my posting is here. There are others as well experiencing similar symptoms.
I went through similar testing requests like putting the core on another devices - in my case a Windows 10 system and it worked fine. One thing I note with all these posts, it seems that one thing they have in common is they involve the Core on a Unix / Unix derivative server. I don’t see reports where this is happening on Windows cores.
As this started around 1.6, I wonder if there is something in their 1.6 Unix code that is causing the problem?
Thanks, John, much appreciated, in an odd way it’s good to have company on this. I am not a pro on this but my SonicTransporter is (I believe) a Linux box so I think your theory may be correct.
@Chris_Groobey caught your other note about removing the Wifi element from your set-up. Some good troubleshooting there.
Based on the recent discussion… The Linux kernel has modified networking elements from release to release and, at times, I’ve seen this negatively impact time sensitive networking applications. I do hope that this is not the issue here as troubleshooting it can be difficult and may not even be able to be troubleshot from the customers side. Basically, it’d take knowledge of the exact kernel version used, any vendor modifications, and knowledge of the published kernel changes. Then identify if any of those changes would impact packet receive and/or tx queues. With ROCK this would be impossible as there is no way to access the system to identify these things. If someone was having issues with Roon installed on top of a Linux distro that person could swap-in different kernel versions to see if that improved things. At this point I think more info from Roon is needed to help narrow the scope of which builds/kernel/ethernet chipsets/etc. versions are having this issue.
But, keep up with the troubleshooting. Continuing to eliminate and narrow to the root cause is always part of the process.
Good comments. I too have seen time-critical issues impacted by point releases of unix kernels. I agree they can be difficult to diagnose and the issues will not be made clear by just reading the Roon logs.
For most end-users of Roon, they don’t dive into too much detail regarding the host OS - nor should they be expected to. I would think Roon in their lab would have a good assortment of common core hosts running the latest OS and validate their releases against those configurations. Obvious candidates would be basic Windows and Mac systems, QNAP and Synology NAS, + others based on market share. I’m with you, I don’t think this type of issue can realistically be troubleshot by customers.
In reading your issue, it shares a number of traits with mine, which I am referencing here: Similar Issue.
In my case, I am running the core on a powerful NAS and there is no performance/capacity problem on the core hardware - however I see the same issues, momentary loss of output zones, etc. I too note that the problem is more frequent since 1.6. I note other references to similar problems throughout these boards. I suspect there is some common underlying cause which is being obfuscated as these are all treated individually as networking / configuration issues in support versus escalating and approaching this as a core bug.
I don’t think so. I would be very surprised if in your configuration any issue related to an underpowered core would create the symptoms you are seeing. An underpowered core would more likely manifest itself when playing a DSD128 to a low resolution player, or when using lots of other DSP functions. These are the things that are compute+time sensitive, not so much for maintaining a basic good connection to an end point.
I’ve moved a couple posts out of #support threads for a general discussion to be had here.
We have thousands of customers on Linux Cores who aren’t running into any issues, so this likely isn’t a widespread issue. The best option for now is to continue troubleshooting in the support threads so we can better understand exactly what you’re experiencing, but this thread can be used for general conversation about this topic.