My experiences with Rock and a 500k+ tracks library

Agreed but ROCK should be able to run Roon Extensions, which are part of the product but it can’t (without help from an external computer). I’d prefer Roon to fix that issue first.

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Yes indeed this is a big oversight. No point in offering extensions ability if your own product can’t support it.

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That’s fine with me since as i stated earlier I don’t have any issues with running Roon core and Plex on my Windows 10 computer. It was more of “just wondering” question anyway.

It did. Library at 1.3M+ tracks and Roon now almost unusable. The PC needs a re-boot every night or more frequently, if using it for an hour it slows down to a snails pace. Tidal no longer worked with my setup and slowed it down even further (if that was possible), so I’ve cancelled my subscription.

Audio analysis is disabled while importing new content and enabled briefly to scan new content afterwards.

Looking at the machine’s system resources when it is running very slow, there is no indications of hitting any limit on RAM, CPU, Networking or Storage resources. Only when its performing Audio Analysis does it enjoy the extra resources available to it. Most of the time the system usage is in the baseline static level!

Help!

Zera

It might be time to pay somebody to take a ground up approach to give you an adequate solution. You have a very challenging situation, and almost nobody (at least on this forum) has experience with such a large library.
Danny offered the advice to have somebody build a system for you. I saw in another post (somewhere), that Andrew Gillis of Small Green Computer built systems for people with very large libraries. The advantages of such an approach are:

  1. A person like him understands system architecture and Roon. It’s not just a lot of powerful parts.
  2. A person like Andrew knows they have to satisfy their customer. Small Green Computer has a history of excellent customer support, but I don’t doubt other builders do as well.
  3. If someone has built a few of these systems in the past, they know what works and what doesn’t. If they’ve built a system that can handle 1.2 M tracks and they have a happy customer, you have a pretty high degree of assurance it will work for you.

Obviously you’ve sunk a lot into this already, and that has to be disappointing (to put it mildly). But putting myself in your place, I’d just want the pain to stop. Now. Perhaps an experienced system builder will be able to make use of some of what you’ve already invested in.

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5 posts were split to a new topic: Issue with skipping tracks with large library

@grossmsj

Hi Scott,

Thanks for your observations and suggestions. I’ll contact Andrew but my budget is currently “burnt”. If I can glean ideas I’d prefer to try say a different OS (Linux) rather than commission another system build.

Yes it’s disheartening not solving the problem, but I loved the technical challenges. My fear is that it’s not currently resolvable using this release of Roon, maybe with it’s current core architecture, not using additional available system resources to combat software bottlenecks in it’s mainly single-threaded software design.

I’m tempted to go back to the beginning with Roon Rock setup and leave Tidal out!

Regards,

Zera

It might be worth putting in a Support ticket to Roon. If nothing else they may be able to see something happening in your logs that points to the nature of the slowdown. No doubt Roon would be interested in knowing what is going on, if they are able to see it. You have nothing to lose in doing so, and it may not only help you but might point to an issue Roon needs to look at.
There do seem to be some odd issues occasionally where Roon starts to leak resources. What you are experiencing might be an extreme example.

@grossmsj

Yes I always intended to contact support but though I’d get answers here. Maybe now is the time as you suggest.

Regards,

Zera

I still think you should not be striping your SSD, if anything is likely to be detracting from performance.

Your comments re your ram and CPU usage would do my thinking point to how Roon manages it’s resource workload.

@evand

That’s an easy thing to try, I’ll re-configure and try that at the weekend.

Do you have any more detail on the operation of Roon apart from what has been released on the Roon technical repository?

I emailed support yesterday, I’m still awaiting a reply.

I’m corresponding with Andrew who has provided some information. If I do find a solution I’ll post it here for interested parties.

Many thanks,

Zera

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Don’t email - post your request in the Support category of this forum, where it will be seen and responded to by the support team

I hadn’t realised that, thanks I’ll do that now.

Zera

It’s a while ago, and I read this by chance. But reading this makes me a little uncertain about how roon’s core functions are actually implemented. I’m still not sure what should be so difficult to handle a million or more tracks.
For example, roon strongly recommends using a separate SSD for the library database. So, it seems that there is a problem in the database system itself if it demands so much I/O performance. And roon always refers to the structure and amount of meta data what makes it so demanding.
But, to be honest, structured and full-text databases und retreival are a well-known technology for at least 20 years - a time with slower spindles and CPUs, few memory and no SSDs ;-).
Does anyone know if the library core is self-made or a third-party product? It’s hard to believe that the technical base is an adequate implementation here.

Still puzzled :wink:

And what difference would it make either way. The database is what it is.
If you search the forum this old pony has been trotted out many times.

It would make a difference if roon listened and invested more effort here. Instead of solving the problem in their S/W they tell customers to invest in more H/W…

My understanding is they are using a a noSQL object store (as opposed to relational) database. I believe they’ve mentioned the name of the database engine they use elsewhere in these forums, but it’s been a while. Maybe your searchfu is better than mine.

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a million tracks? no issues there.

the problem comes when each of those tracks has credits with roles and those credits have connections to other albums, tracks, and compositions. Also, all those artists who are related to other artists, and how. Plus the links in bios and reviews. Plus album level credits and all the connections at that level.

Suddenly your million tracks turns into a hundred million objects with even more links. You are thinking about this problem like a traditional music player, when you should be thinking about it like wikipedia.

You remember the past very differently than I do. Things used to be slow and very limited by RAM capacity. SSDs changed that considerably.

Today, no one would ever run their “structured and full-text databases” on spinning disks. Spinning disks are a relic of the past, used for archival and low-touch data. To romanticize the past 20 years in this manner is deceptive and misleading. Seriously, what application did you use on your PC 20 years ago that handled a million tracks gracefully?

Looking at an article from 2011 that compares the performance of one of the fastest spinning drives to a lame SSD from that era, which is only 9 years ago, we are looking at the spinning disk being 60x slower.

Given that the price of the SSD today that we ask for is under $25 shipped, I’m going to stick with the idea that it’s a fair thing to ask that you not use antiques to run modern software.

It is self made. The disk storage is based on leveldb, and the rest is in-memory indicies.

I’m curious why you think it’s hard to believe?

Roon has always been about having decent hardware and focusing on pushing that hardware with software. It’s never been interesting to us to run on the hardware of generations past to save a few bucks.

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Hi Danny,

Thanks for your response.

Certainly, it’s not only a single track information. I’ts rather similar to linked web pages, as well.
Many companies still use spindles for such tasks :wink:. I do not romanticize the past 20 years, because in the IT business it was and still is hard work to overcome boundaries. What I mean is that esp. with limited H/W resources it’s always a challenging job to get things done. But in many cases great things had been achieved despite of this. Today, IT S/W development in general - if not for embedded solutions - tends to move things like performance from S/W solution to growing H/W requirements. It’s not against using current technologies.

With roon you have entered the private PC as a host. And such PCs aren’t always at the top of the line. You can make high H/W recommendations here, but you can’t control it like with an embedded solution. And what may work very well in an embedded system may have it’s problems if transferred to a PC platform or vice versa.

And that’s what at least some of your customers obviously feel. And it’s not only about money, but simply about the need to upgrade their hardware. Maybe such customers are not your key customers, but at least this makes it more difficult to convince a broader range of customers, here.

When you read about the roon universe, it sounds so nice and easy. But if you look deeper for a concrete personal solution things can get really complicated very quickly. And most people are simply looking for solutions. They usually don’t want to spend much time in elaborating solutions :wink:.

But please, don’t get me wrong. I like roon for organizing and presenting music. And in general it’s amazing how many possibilities you have to build your own roon universe. But we should never forget that it’s about organizing, presenting and listening to music, not more and not less :wink:.
As some sort of IT nerd I like to walk through all the possibilities to get a working, slim and easy solution. But that’s nerdy, not the regular case :wink:.

Matthias