My experiences with Rock and a 500k+ tracks library

Hi Brian,

Thanks for providing this information on Rock.

I have a large music library and was previous running my core on a Synology DS3617xs with some success. To reduce power and reduce some of the burden off my NAS with the Roon core struggling, I thought I’d try running it on a Rock system.

So I built up one using a Intel NUC i7 (Intel BOXNUC8I7BEH3), 32GB RAM, 4TB SSD, 256GB M.2. The larger SSD drive hosting my Master music and all the MP3’s stored on my NAS.

With my collection now over 1 million tracks, the Rock core is running out of steam and becoming sluggish. It’s purely the shear quantity of music/database entries.

My question is, have a reached a maximum limit to Roon or is it just this hardware configuration? If it’s hardware than can you point me to an ideal core hardware configuration that will not expire with a growing collection? If the limitation is Rock software, are their any improvements forcast?

Regards,

Zera

Probably should tag @brian for you here. Maybe going with a non NUC solution could be the best option but if it can’t run ROCK maybe a Linux build or you might need to go with windows.

There is now an i9 version of the SonicTransporter. But with a library that big running off of NAS’s, just juicing up the CPU may get you nowhere.

Roon 1.7 on the latest RoonOS will outperform any other platform out there, including other Linux systems, other manufacturer’s Roon Core devices, and MacOS/Windows.

We have ~10 libraries out there that are this size. 1million tracks is REALLY big, but should be doable with the right gear.

You will want a faster system than the NUC.

Which would be what?

That seems like a pretty hefty system.

The NUCs are quiet and small. You will want a much more powerful CPU. One with a heftier fan and cooling system. One that doesn’t have total system TDP of 15-30w, but more like 125w just for the CPU. The Intel Core i9 9900K comes to mind. You will want fast RAM, and the fastest NVMe SSD for the Roon database.

1 million tracks is about 100k albums, and at even $12 an album, that’s over a million dollars of music! I think budget is not really a concern here. Good thing, since this will be a very expensive “computer”.

It will also be noisy and hot, but maybe it can be liquid cooled. If you are doing all this, you probably want to skip the NAS and go DAS.

I’m sure there is a dealer or integrator that is willing to build and maintain this for a fee. I’m sure I could find you someone if you really needed it… or you can go at it by yourself. Be warned though, this is a very different task from buying a NUC and installing some RAM and drives.

You’d also need to make sure your ethernet chipset was compatible with RoonOS, but that shouldn’t be a big deal unless you chose to get exotic.

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How do you back up something this size?

And how big, approximately?

I see your point. A Xeon system rack-mounted in the basement was what I was thinking. But you have to stick with something RoonOS will run on, right?

you will have trouble finding fast NVMe drives that are small. For example, this is the type of thing you get if you don’t care about price:

It only comes in 512GB and 1TB – and 512GB is more than enough. Get the 1TB if you are worried. The cost differential is tiny compared to the $thousands you are going to spend building this system.

Yup, but RoonOS will run on most things if you get the ethernet chipset right. You want the best single-core performance, good-sized cache, and fast RAM/SSD.

same as eveyrthing else: 2 copies – one local, one remote.

Have a computer or NAS doing the local copy over SMB from the RoonOS device once in a while, and then use something like BackBlaze to do a remote backup.

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Yeah, maybe.

I use BackBlaze. There isn’t enough time before the sun goes cold to do the first back up of a million tracks.

After that, the incrementals are quicker.

I do too. I have about 20tb of personal content (as opposed to OS files that are easy to deduplicate) stored there. It took more than a month, but I forget exactly how long. It’s not something I really thought about and before I thought about it again, it was done.

I’ve restored about 4tb in the past and it was pretty fast. I just had an 8tb drive of photos die on me today. My wife knocked spinning drive off desk while moving things around. Ugh. I’ll be doing a 6tb restore next week.

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Hi Danny
Which option of Backblaze you using , Cloud or Backup?
Dirk

Backblaze’s unlimited storage “Backup” product. I use it on multiple machines in the house.

Thanks
Now that they are in EU, I am most probably signup with them
Dirk

Hardware configuration. With a library that size you will need to build a custom desktop unit. NUC CPU’s are mobile (aka laptop) CPUs. Desktop CPUs are much beefier (and take up more energy; thus needing more cooling). Others have weighed in, you can check out my current configuration, if curious The Soul of a New Machine. Picture of the build a couple of posts previous.

In the 1.7 notes, it was indicated this is due to switching from Mono to .NET Core. Is there any reason you don’t support .NET Core on other Linux systems? E.g., .NET Core RPMs are installed from Microsoft’s repo, couldn’t your start wrapper bash script check for that and use it if it’s found, falling back to your private Mono distribution if not found?

We will eventually get there but right now we had problems supporting this generically and really wanted it to get out the door

Are you running windows on this machine?

Good to hear it’s the intention. I wondered about why it was ROCK-only at the moment. Seems it’d be easier on you folks if you only had to support one .NET runtime, since you don’t have to do double testing and all that.

Another option is to make ROCK friendlier to KVM by including the virtio drivers (at least for scsi and net). KVM has really low overhead as a hypervisor, so instead of you having to worry about what system the user is running, let the hypervisor abstract it from you. Someone building a big system with direct-attached storage is likely to have stuff like an LSI-based RAID card managing a RAID6 array for the raw music files, for example. That just becomes transparent to you as they pass it through to the VM as a second virtual drive.

(I still would like to see stand-alone Linux support .NET Core, though. Even ROCK in a VM is still not my preference as a 20+ year sysadmin, since you have ROCK so locked down…)

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