I pretty much agree with these comments; if Roon is supposed to be appliance like, then it needs to behave like one. Asking grandma to check her network and submit logs using the link provided probably won’t win new customers, lol.
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Same here. Really seems like Roon has “gone to the dogs”.
Many months of reporting these problems but no sign of real progress.
I used to love it, but I am close to giving up now. If I get wind of an alternative that might work for me, I will move.
If where I move works well enough, I won’t come back.
A sad day 
Meaning:
If something has gone to the dogs, it has gone badly wrong and lost all the good things it had.
https://www.usingenglish.com/reference/idioms/gone+to+the+dogs.html
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That’s exactly what @anon77144803 and yours truly were talking about… this could have been either a large metadata update running on the one-threaded server, or a Tidal/Qobuz storage library update running… I have been observing this in realtime many time over the years… This is not a new problem… maybe you only now have noticed, but this has been present forever…
In my case and as far as I can remember, I didn’t notice this while my database was still south of 80.000 tracks or so… then, with a growing database, the processes would run for ever longer, and it would become impossible not to notice, if one is a daily and intense user of Roon as I was back then. Of course, less use of Roon (less time per day, not every day) will increase probability this problem goes unnoticed.
As far as I understand it, one fundamental design decision is to keep all database access on the server being handled by one single thread… for data integrity’s sake… So, while these batch background processes with massive database access run, all database-dependent user activity is being slowed-down to a crawl… the system becomes unusable…
It’s my opinion that there’s no need to get support involved; they know about this problem, but can ultimately do nothing to resolve it.
Support suggest many things even if they might very well know what is going on. There are intrinsic problems born out of design decisions taken at the very inception of Roon. Now there is nothing they can do to support, so… red herrings come to mind…
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We’re on the same train… This week I installed the newest incarnation of LMS… the interface not so polished, music discovery not as neat as in Roon… but very much usable… there even are artist discographies and an integrated library… local files together with albums from streaming services… And it’s fast… and so low-weight, so little stressing on the hardware… The server developed in Perl, the headless client endpoint in C… I will not renew my Roon subscription when it ends.
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I have LMS as a backup for when Roon has problems. If it had a good DSP system I could move to it as my main music player. There are PEQ plugins but I’ve not had much success with them. The Material Skin is excellent. My LMS server runs on a Pi 4. Lightweight and efficient.
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Yes, the PEQ plugins are not good in LMS, luckily I only use PEQ on my WiiM Pro Plus and it has a 10 band PEQ that sounds equal to Roon IMO.
My Kef LS50W2’S play equally good with LMS as does my Chord Poly/ Mojo2, so I’m sorted.
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Just for comparison…My Roon Server is a 2012 Mac Mini and my Roon Library is stored on a 2020 MAC Mini M1…both work just great!
Good on 'ya, mate. But the point isn’t “Roon never works”; rather, its “when Roon stops working, it ends up being a nightmare to troubleshoot”.
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So, it seems that I am in the club too now. Started a Support thread a few days ago about my NUC going haywire out of nothing, becoming almost unresponsive with a library around 75000 tracks.
Just out of interest: with LMS you mean Logitech Media Server?
Can LMS be arranged like Roon, eg one server with many outputs, like HifiBerry, Windows media PC etc.? And what anbout multichannel playback?
That would be a gamechanger for me.
In my opinion Roon lost its way. Too much focus on “goodies” and too less on stability, bugfixes.
Its getting harder and harder just to listen to music, never knowing when all of a sudden everything freezes to death.
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Are you on a wired network?
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Maybe it’s time to upgrade your NUC.
You have quite a large library.
I store my local library on an Asustor NAS and my home network in wired with ethernet NOT using wireless, which can be problematic.
I have a Qobuz sub which runs very well with Roon.
Roon now seems to be confirming that its quixotic attempts to identify the unidentifiable is a (although perhaps not only) cause of this symptom:
Unfortunately the suggestion resolution is a little unfortunate: (1) take the unidentified albums off-line and out of Roon, and (2) make a “feature request” for the ability to earmark unidentified albums as unidentifiable and have Roon stop grinding gears trying to identify them.
With due respect, if turning on the headlights hindered steering in a car, would the idea to make steering work with the headlights on be considered a feature? This may not be a “bug” per se, but it sure is heck is a malfunction. We’re just asking Roon to stop the malfunction…stop downgrading performance with an unnecessary and useless process (in the case of albums that are not identifiable).
The idea that it’s a niche case problem with a library with hundreds of unidentifiable albums calls into question Roon’s target audience. Isn’t it supposed to include hardcore music lovers? Wouldn’t we have vinyl rips, bootlegs, live concert recordings, DVD-Audio rips, and DJ sets? We have to banish those from our collection? Hasn’t this community, made up of hardcore music fans, which provides more user support than Roon itself does, been a key part of growing Roon?
I suggest the hardcore fans with the heavily curated libraries deserve some love. To me that actually involves looking at why the database is so terribly resource inefficient. That could solve the problem without the workaround of earmarking the unidentifiable for Roon to stop trying to identify. But if that isn’t in the plan, then I hope at least this band-aid would be.
Thanks for listening.
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If it is badly broken they should fix it, not get users to upvote it 
The whole metadata update and analysis process that goes off and runs the main thread at 100% for a long period of time because you added 10 albums really needs some work to improve it and tidy up the process.
How hard would it be to allow us to pick a time window or do a manual scan to do this like Plex Server does.
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This! And Roon support’s suggestion is ridiculous and aggravating towards their users…
This, and the Qobuz/Tidal storage database update processes, which run the main thread at 100%, too…
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Bad design choices we are having to suffer. It’s basic functionality whoever really thought it was a good idea to constantly look for metadata. Make it a user choice to update or not, there are lots of albums out in the world without such data so they are useless in Roon.
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I suspect there is a deeper issue. I have noticed that any substantial library work causes performance issues. Like if I apply a Roon Tag to 20 albums in quick succession. That seems to jam up Roon as though it is thinking/processing. For how long depends on how much I did.
Others may not see this because their collections are not as deeply curated, or at least not the way I’ve done it, which is to apply tags to every artist and album.
Thus, I suggest there is a deeper performance issue with the database schema.
I guess I also don’t understand…if Roon support is to some extent aware that metadata processes can be a problem with Roon, why do we users have to be part of determining the development queue to have it fixed? Why do problems laid out in repeated support requests and discussions that are pretty obvious in the forum require consumer interaction with feature requests to have malfunctions addressed?
I get maybe there are bigger problems out there…not everyone has hundreds of albums that won’t be identified…but still if there is a clear issue that causes what is in effect a malfunction, and it may actually be the cause of other symptoms besides dropped remotes, poor performance, and skipped tracks, you’d think they would just jump on fixing it. Seems like this would be an obvious thing to address and be proactive about it.
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I have hundrets of unidentified albums for years, and I am not quite sure whether they are the ones to blame. This metadata check nonsense was not always terrible like that, I had this issue about two years ago and then all of a sudden it vanished, just to come back half a year ago.
Anyway, I have ditched Roon into the bin and using JRriver again. I run it as a server on a Raspi 5, have my zones back and can play multichannel files without any misinterpretation of channel mapping.
Roon has run its course and is no longer a serious option for me.
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I feel so bad for all these users having so many unsolvable problems. (Like another user above, I’ve been running roonserver on a dedicated 2012 Mac Mini for about 6 years now, and I have never had a single performance issue. I do have plenty of RAM on it, and I’ve always heard that’s a major help in running it smoothly.)
Anyway, that aside, on the “unidentified” albums… I know I have some, but is there a way to “find” them in roon to figure out how many i have? Not using “Focus” i don’t think…
EDIT: Nevermind. found it in Focus. “Identified” is listed in the “Inspector” section…
To be clear and fair, I have still been seeing this 100%+ CPU usage spike recently and seemingly for about the last year. Maybe a little less…time flies. BUT, it has not caused a remote or endpoint to drop lately. Seems that some change to Roon tolerates that condition a little better than it used to.
At this point the main symptom I see is that Roon starts to load pages slowly and it takes a while for it to load Artists or Albums or lists of Tags. Secondarily I still see tracks skipped for no apparent reason or that the music just pauses. That could easily be a symptom of the dropping endpoints aspect since closing and opening an endpoint does cause Roon to always pause.
Just for complete clarity as to what I am seeing now. Finally, we only post this because we care. Roon is a great product that could be so much better if it were truly stable for those users that have implemented the right hardware and network. The contents of the library shouldn’t be a limiter.
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Yes same here it’s not stopped endpoints recently at all but it still maxes out the single thread and can cause it to be sluggish during this. Given I have a pretty fast cpu, music is local SSD data attached, it’s not a huge library and only 9 unidentified albums no idea why this should happen.
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