Mac Mini Slowing Down After Few Days of Uptime

Support
1

I have a similar problem. I use mac mini server late 2012 model running roon server. The system is fine for a few days then slows down. It takes about 10 sec to add an album when it is good. When it slows down, it takes a few minutes instead. Other functions slow down as well. After a reboot, everything is normal again. Music plays fine when slow. Should I open a separate ticket?

2

I have also had this. Changing my DNS helped a little but it’s still slow

3

Check the memory consumption of Roon just after restart, and when it feels slow. See if there’s a significant increase.

When it feels slow, does any other non-Roon activity on the Mac feel abnormally unresponsive, perhaps with a prolonged spinning beach ball?

4

I recall seeing memory footprint of 3GB for RoonAppliance when normal, around 4~5GB when slow. My mac is dedicated to roon server. I don’t recall seeing the beach ball during launching other programs like activity monitor, finders, etc. I don’t mind rebooting the machine from time to time so much but every time I reboot the machine, roon rescans my NAS storage, which takes a long time.

5

Hey @shinyc – can you note a timestamp the next time this is happening? When our team is back after the holidays we can enable some diagnostics and get a better sense of what’s going on.

Is this Mac Mini running an SSD or spinning disk?

Thanks and sorry for the trouble!

7

Does your Mac Mini 2012 only have 4GB RAM? That’s not enough. You need 8GB.

8

hi mike,

will do. my mac mini uses spinning type disk.

Have a nice holidays!

9

Thanks for chiming in.

my mac mini spec:

  • mac mini server (late 2012 )
  • processor 2.3GHz intel core i7 (quad)
  • memory 16GB
  • HDD 1TB + 1TB (not mirrored)

roon library size:

  • 10,000 albums on nas
  • 8,500 albums on tidal
  • 270,000 tracks all together

I use HQPlayer on another machine which gets its input from the mac mini over a separate network, directly connected (i.e. no switch).

10

Is the “Mac Mini” slowing down, or “Roon Server”? Is anything else running, and hogging the cores (must be)? Have you looked under CPU in Activity viewer to see what’s hogging things? Have you tried creating a new user, logging out of the Mac, logging in as the new user and running Roon Server? And finally, have you tried installing the OS on a spare external drive (USB or SD), logging in and running Roon Server?

11

An almost 20,000 album library has its Roon database not on SSD but on HDD. Big no no. And that likely is contributing to or even the primary cause of the slow performance.

AJ

1 Like
12

10 000 albums!

NAS!

Well that’s your answer.

How could you possibly afford to buy 10 000 albums? £100 000 on music! I’m envious :slight_smile:

13

Agree. @shinyc you need a SSD for the database.

14

My significant partner brings home promo copies. She is in that industry. I steal them. She knows. :sweat_smile:

15

Lucky you!

Seriously, though - big database to manage. Not surprised the system struggles.

16

Changing hdd inside a mac mini is nightmarish(at least to me). So I will try the SD method first. In the mean time, once it gets slow again, I will have it diagnosed by the roon team.

17

I wonder what benefit there is by logging in as a new user. It is an easy solution to try out so I will give it a go. Then, I wonder if it is better to leave the system not logged in at all. Would roon server not run that way?

18

Hi Mike,

My system is slow again at this very moment. So please consider this as a timestamp you requested. Please take a look at the situation on your end.

19

Hello @shinyc,

I am taking a look at the diagnostics from your machine for that timestamp and I do notice the slow album being added on your Roon Remote but the diagnostics from your Roon Remote do not have a clear indication as to why.

I have only seen the report for your Roon Remote come in but your RoonServer may provide some more information here, can I please ask you to manually send over the Roon logs from your Mac Mini using these instructions? If you do not have Dropbox or Google Drive just let me know and I can provide an alternate upload method.

Thanks,
Noris

20

I sent the file to your message inbox. Please have a look. Thanks.

21

Hello @shinyc,

Thank you for providing that information. I believe this issue may be DNS related and we have seen users have a better experience in the past if they change their router’s DNS servers from the ISP provided ones to Google DNS or Cloudflare DNS. Can you please give this a try and let me know if it helps?

Thanks,
Noris