Linux infrequent crashes [Solved; failing harddrive]

As an audiophile and Linux user I was very happy with the trouble-free install on Ubuntu 18.04 (i5 3200 quad core, 16gb memory on Toshiba SSD drive). Ingestion of the 30.000 albums (on one new Seagate 6TB harddrive) went reasonably fast and everything seemed to work just fine. However, while playing with Roon for a few days it suffered irregular crashes, and I figured that my collection was probably too large for my hardware. So I decided to upgrade to AMD Ryzen 7 2700x with again 16gb memory, now installed on the much faster 2.M Samsung EVO 970 drive. Now everything installed even faster and I wad able to test the backup function, that worked fine. Only it crashed just as often as before. I have tried to install it on OpenSuse Leap 15 and Kubuntu 18.04, and both resulted in the same behaviour. Ubuntu at one point gave a system error mentioning mono-sgen in the report. I have made screenshots of the report, I could upload if necessary. Is there any way of getting Roon to work perfectly under Linux? Of do have to resort to Windows 10/Ubuntu 18.04 multiboot and have Roon run on Windows?

Best wishes,

Marcel van Tilburg

I’ve had Roon for over 2 years on a NUC with Ubuntu 16.04. Roon Core is pretty stable. In general, it’s been up as long as the NUC has been up when I’ve checked (like now, up since Aug 24), or at least there’s not been any incident sufficiently noticeable to make me go look back at logs. I have looked at logs to help debug some Android Remote connection and NAS mounting issues, but that’s a different story.

I’ve been running on Debian for a couple of years. The only trouble I’ve had was with watchdog timeouts on sleeping cores of my Ryzen. I turned off CPU power management on the motherboard and no problems since. I do shutdown and restart the Roon process nightly for backups but Debian is up for weeks or months at a time, only rebooted for Debian updates.

You don’t state if you’re using Ubuntu Desktop or Server. Anyway, I’ve been running on 18.04 Server since early May with absolutely no issues. That said, your collection is an order of magnitude larger than mine. The logs should provide some pointer to the issue.

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Thank you for your quick replies and sorry for my late reaction. Yesteday I did make a multiboot and installed Roon Core on Windows 10 and guess what: again infrequent crashes. I am beginning to suspect that maybe the audio analysing may have something to do with it: playing with higher number of cores yields impressive analysing speeds (though it would still take a few days to analyse 145.000 tracks), but it makes it crash sooner. When I turn it off completely it seems to run fine. I do not wish to use audio leveling or anything DSP anyhow. Maybe I should try this setting in a Linux distro, too and see what happens. I will let you know.

Or maybe the above average amount of FLAC and DSD files has something to do with it? @Fernando_Pereira and @pwright92 do you have large music collections? Or the not very expensive 6TB Seagate harddrive (taken from an external USB drive)?

@Martin_Webster: I used Ubuntu Desktop.
@pwright92: I fiddled with the CPU power management in Asus Prime X470-Pro bios but it doesn’ t seem to help…

If you are crashing with two operating systems, I would suspect the hardware. Most likely RAM or power supply.

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My collection is not large, around 1200 albums/17k tracks, all PCM FLAC. I agree with @pwright92 that what you describe suggests hardware flakiness. I’d start by removing 1/2 the RAM at a time (assuming 8GB sticks) to try to isolate the problem. Roon Core on Ubuntu Desktop works fine with 8GB anyway.

Thank you so much for not giving up on me! Changed RAM into 16GB DDR4 last week since new motherboard didn’t support my old DDR3, so that couldn’t be causing this. I am going to replace the power supply tonight with a brand new Corsair RM750i. And now I remember somebody suggested that right at the beginning of this adventure… I’ll keep you updated!

Finally found out the reason for the crashes: as the installation of a new PSU didn’ t help either, there was only one part in the PC that could be the blame: the harddisk. A colleague who had already warned me for the dubious reliability of cheaper Seagate harddisks, lent me two old but still reliable Hitachi Ultrastar 3TB disks and they made all the difference. Roon Server now works effortlessly on Ubuntu 18.04 Desktop! When I checked the SMART status of the 6TB Seagate, I saw millions of read and seek errors, although it’ s only one month old and ‘disk is healthy’ . That was the last Seagate drive I bought! I have ordered two 4TB HGST 6K7000 Ultrastar harddrives to start all over. Now I can finally start getting all the metadata the way I want it. Many thanks for your help!

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Did you ever look at /var/log/messages in all the different attempts with various OSes?

… no, and I guess it’s too late for that now; made completely new OS installs every time…

I too have issues with Ubuntu Mate 18.04. Roon crashes randomly and has nothing to do with memory or cpu or disk - I have monitoried this. It seems to happen either during playblack or just starting a track.