My experiences with Rock and a 500k+ tracks library

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

@grossmsj

Hi Scott,

Thanks for your observations and suggestions. Iā€™ll contact Andrew but my budget is currently ā€œburntā€. If I can glean ideas Iā€™d prefer to try say a different OS (Linux) rather than commission another system build.

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

Iā€™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 Iā€™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 itā€™s resource workload.

@evand

Thatā€™s an easy thing to try, Iā€™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, Iā€™m still awaiting a reply.

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

Many thanks,

Zera

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Donā€™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 hadnā€™t realised that, thanks Iā€™ll do that now.

Zera

Itā€™s a while ago, and I read this by chance. But reading this makes me a little uncertain about how roonā€™s core functions are actually implemented. Iā€™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? Itā€™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/Wā€¦

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

2 Likes

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 ā€œstructured and full-text databasesā€ 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, Iā€™m going to stick with the idea that itā€™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.

Iā€™m curious why you think itā€™s hard to believe?

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

8 Likes

Hi Danny,

Thanks for your response.

Certainly, itā€™s not only a single track information. Iā€™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 itā€™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. Itā€™s not against using current technologies.

With roon you have entered the private PC as a host. And such PCs arenā€™t always at the top of the line. You can make high H/W recommendations here, but you canā€™t control it like with an embedded solution. And what may work very well in an embedded system may have itā€™s problems if transferred to a PC platform or vice versa.

And thatā€™s what at least some of your customers obviously feel. And itā€™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 donā€™t want to spend much time in elaborating solutions :wink:.

But please, donā€™t get me wrong. I like roon for organizing and presenting music. And in general itā€™s amazing how many possibilities you have to build your own roon universe. But we should never forget that itā€™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 thatā€™s nerdy, not the regular case :wink:.

Matthias

Agreed with everything you said. To clarify our positions:

Weā€™d rather build for the future and not the pastā€¦ we could spend resources on supporting older hardware, but itā€™s not where we think our time is best spent.

In regards to customer acquisition, fewer and fewer have this problem as hardware gets upgraded as time goes on. Itā€™s hard to quantify how many customers we could acquire by supporting older gear, but our feeling is that we have more growth opportunity by moving forward.

Additionally, more and more people are finding that general purpose computers are pretty annoying and theyā€™d rather have an appliance-like experience. Yes, they must buy hardware for ROCK or Nucleus, but thatā€™s what it takes to get that experience.

2 Likes

Just a bit of perspective, I WAS running the core on an antique (2010 mac mini core 2 duo with an SSD) when in my trial period and it ran really well with my 35K tracks.

I assume you meant to send this to @maddib, since your mention of ā€œwith an SSDā€ is exactly the perspective I have. SSD makes more a difference than anything else.

Very curious: have you ever experimented (or considered to do so) how this knowledge (networked relationships) would integrate/ perform using a Graph Database?