Less CPU and memory allocated + offline use

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1

Hello,

Here are some thoughts after few months of using roon.

I have a lifetime sub, server installed on a headless debian, running 24/7. All albums loaded, all tracks analized, etc. Everything looks pretty good, but… not really.

Even there is no activity on roon server, it consumes over 100% of 1 core almost all the time. Rare cases when I saw something bellow 60%.
As of memory used, it stays all the time at more than 70%. And I have 32 GB RAM on this machine. This is crazy!

Having a large library, full start time for my server + all other scaning things, takes arround 40-50 minutes, never count exactly, not my target to see when it finished.

Don’t know if this issue will be ever solved by roon, i.e. to have rational & decent resources allocated for things that are really performed by the app at that moment. It seams that roon server is doing something all the time, but that’s not something I asked it to do.

For an app that I’m not using all the time plus seeing this big nachine resources allocation, I’ve just decided to simply shutdown roon server when I’m not interested to listen music, through it anyway. I just start it when I need to scan some new music or want to listen music on roon.

Wondering if roon developers plan any of the followings features:

  • to allow offline use with no restrictions. Max one time license check once in a while wouldn’t be this enough?? I would like to vote for this, where is the topic with this feature request?
  • to select when to update the metadata or even to disable updating it at all in the background, including the 3rd party streaming services (Tidal and Qobuz). Can’t this be an option? Bringing metadata on new albums is fine, but scaning after changes is annoying.
  • when the app is in standby, no client streaming through roon , simply to go really to standby, so stop caching so much data in RAM (the database is mirrored in RAM??)
  • stop developing unusefull things. ARC for android is not working nice when I’m remotely, the fowarding ports is a mess (I don’t like to use upnp on my router, I manually forward the needed ports in NAT, no big deal). So for me, at least this remote impossible connection is a no-go direction. What kind of quality (or plesasure) would you get remotely and not through your dedicated audio home system?? There are other audio streaming services or can be used some saved music on mobile when traveling.
  • desktop gui is nice but I’m on it just when I’m adding new albums or want to search in roon database. Would be good to see what processes/tasks are running in background, what is consumming so much CPU+RAMs. A console with logs and services running, etc would be nice, since I am on desktop anyway, right?
  • in order to connect to linux server, I have to install a full server on my windows PC as remote. So other machine resources sacrified on roon altar. Well, on Windows I can simply start/stop the roon server as I wish, not a big issue though. In this respect, a web connection to my roon server can’t be implemented?
  • Plus, I would preffer a web based interface, to be able to copy paste what I may need (album name, artist name, track name).
  • resizing of the diaplayed page (text size + number of albums displayed) would be also nice. Again, a web remote connection, is something impossible to be done?

By the way, I discovered also that I can vote on some roon features request just for 3 times. I vote already on Discogs integration, even I don’t think this is what I would like to see (to integrate with a personal list on Discogs) - I rather preffer to use Discogs id for manual tagging purposes. Maybe I misunderstood soimething about this voting limit which sounds so weird. Why there is a vote limit at all??

On another hand, there are other things with roon that makes me happy:

  • It is great I can stream 24 bits (up to 192khz) tracks to my audio system, both in stereo or multichannel
  • it is also nice I can stream MQA through my streaming device and have full unfold
  • it is also good I can stream dsf files (there are converted on the fly on my end-streaming device). Would be even better if also the compressed dst would be supported, even this format doesn’t support tagging
  • It is good to see all the versions of on album I have - plus that I can select which one to be primary
  • Moving music between different zones is nice, sometimes I am using it

Just sharing some thoughts. Hope that some of the above mentionned issues will be handled at some point, but, tbh, I have no big expectations.

1 Like
2

This exists. Well „no restrictions“ as far as no online content is needed for the features. It won’t fetch reviews from TiVo and so on. There is a license check once in 30 days.

As for your resource usage, I don’t think the behavior is normal, at least it’s not as if everyone on the forum has that. I don’t see any Support ticket you ever opened, but I’d recommend to and have staff take a look at your logs.

(ARC is quite good now, finally, for me, and has lots of advantages for me over streaming service apps)

3

It seams that offline use and memory usage are two different issues. No matter how is the internet status, memory usage seams to be always over 65%. In offline mode, playback is indeed working, just tested, but there are no artwork (seams I need to tweak how metadata is handled, to prefer only locals) and, of course, no Tivo infos or whatever. CPU usage seams to drop to 1-5%. Thought that the internet connection have a dramatically impact on PC resources. My bad here, wrong assumption. Anyway I don’t have a good reason to ask for support on this, don’t see how they can minimize the memory usage. Using dll shared libraries which seams are not optimized for linux environment, what can I say? I am not a specialist in programming, I’m just using my common sense here. I think. :slight_smile:

For me ARC is working only with UPnP enabled in router. When it is used remotely. having a big delay when asking for some track playback, I personally prefer a streaming service which is intended to be used in a such way.

I’d love to have the roon service available 24/7, no doubts, this would be the normal thing, but till the machine resources issue will not be solved, I will continue to shutdown my roon server when I’m not using it. I prefer to keep up and running 24/7 only the services I am mostly using or which are using much less resources, like plex, emby, etc. I am doing this also because after several weeks of continued roon server running, I experienced unusual disconnections during playback. I had to hit play again to resume the playback. Only a roon server restart solved the issue.

Not a big deal bottom line. It is how it is.

4

You seem to have unusually high memory and RAM usage, seems reason enough to open a ticket. They might eventually not be able to change that if there’s some kind of reasonable explanation, but they can surely take a look at logs and determine if such an explanation exists in your scenario.

5

Thanks for your advice, probable I’ll give a try and will check with roon support if there is an issue with my setup which cause this RAM usage. These are the results after full load and stop scanning (took 40 mins from service restart):

pmap -x $(pidof RoonAppliance) | tail -1
total kB 51745032 21221184 20780784

top command:
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
1170632 root 20 0 49.4g 20.2g 28280 S 0.7 64.9 20:48.40 RoonAppliance
By chance, if you know or have a linux roon server installed, which would be a normal memory usage?

6

How about full transparency on the total size of your Roon imported music library (local and streaming track count)? Because you may be in the edge case category, one that Roon is not designed to handle — and never will be.

AJ

7

Please define what is “edge case category”? I read already Roon System Requirements and Hardware recommendations

The numbers are not relevant anyway. I saw similar RAM usage issues reported again and again by different users for different hw configurations and with different database album sizes: 20k, 35k, 83k, etc…

Clear I don’t have to open any ticket for this issue since it is well known and repeated so many times.

An another thought would be to take out from roon storage all the “normal” 16-44 albums and to leave there only the special formats, those which plex for ex can’t handle without conversion.

BTW, from what I saw in this topic: Huge 100K albums database (Roon Requirements) - Roon Software Discussion - Roon Labs Community
100K albums may require i9 CPUs 64GB RAM, fast SSD! Well, now I feel very lucky since I have 82k albums (so almost 100K), but only I5, 32G RAM and with OS on a SSD NVMe. How to complain of 60-70% RAM usage with such poor hw specs?! I’m joking, of course.

Whatever… That’s why I am just saying, it is how it is. We are just playing with what we have and what we can get.

8

You are an edge case. At 82,000 albums, you are pushing toward a million tracks.

Largest Libraries

If you have over 250K+ tracks in your library, consider us impressed! You’re among the top .01% of Roon users, and you have a library most of us could only dream of.

Alert

With libraries this large, we expect the right hardware will work, but it’s not something we test in-house.

Since Roon does not test music libraries of that size, you pretty much are on your own to get Roon to work satisfactorily — if it even will work satisfactorily with your library size and contents.

AJ

9

Thank you for your comments, very valuable and helpful. The memory issue is finally solved, let’s delete all the tracks and keep only 100k tracks (or say a number) in order to have roon properly running. Or let’s split them in different storages and enable just one at a time. Or let’s use alternative streaming solutions. Or the best one: why not to buy additional n roon subs for each 100k tracks just to be within the tested and recommended (should I read supported??) roon library sizes. This is the solution? Maybe you are working for roon? You don’t want a better roon application after all? I am teasing you, joking with you, don’t panic! :slight_smile:

I would like to add here that a similar streaming app, plex for ex, having the same number of albums as in roon plus a lot of movies + tv shows + music videos, etc, running on the same machine, at the same time, it needs much less resources when is in standby. If I say it needs 5% is much. Sometimes it even didn’t show up in the top command in the first 20 pids. Someone may say to not compare apples with oranges. Just don’t, please. I am not a fan of anything, I am just using some apps if they suits my needs for something.

Anyway, maybe is just me who is concerned about this unusual memory usage by roon, in standby or when doing its thing, whatever is the size of the user library or the machine specs. And all these are just thoughts, not complains, not asking for help. Roon app is just working fine, no glitches, no slow downs, but it just could do this better.

At the end I am really asking myself why I posted such silly things here. Seams that the problem is not with the app, is always with the user and how is he using the app. Mea culpa!

…my 2 cents on this topic