While overall performance is better on this new M2 8gb/256gb mac mini (vs on my Synology 918+ NAS), I find it totally lags when I’m adding a new album (or more than one at a time), or favouriting a bunch of albums at once, etc.
My local library is only ~1000 tracks and sits on the NAS HDDs, and I use Qobuz otherwise.
Macmini sits on ethernet.
How many tracks in your Qobuz library?
Roon treat’s local and music storage the same.
If you look at how much Memory and processor Roon is using, what does it say?
8% of CPU & 3.55GB RAM being used when idle, and when adding an album memory stays the same but CPU jumps up to ~20% but it takes up to a minute sometimes to complete the “add”
That seems way too long.
How many tracks in your Qobuz library?
I currently running my Library on an M1 Mac Mini with 16GB RAM and 90k tracks and performance is pretty good
How do I “count” all my tracks?
I can see 302 albums but no such tally for tracks.
It’s not a high number whichever way you look at it. The Mac Mini has fast(ish) storage and fast memory, though the base model M2 is slower than the M1 from what I remember.
You haven’t really offered much info. Where are the music files, networked or local? Have you tired to narrow down the bottleneck: eg, copying files, or Roon identifying them? And honestly, I tried a 8GB M2 mini and wasn’t happy with it. Others say they don’t have problems with 16GB. Is anything else going on on the Mac, have you turned off background tasks such as software update and indexing? Oh, indexing… if its brand new, the OS is probably still indexing the HD, which will hit performance.
Yeah, like I said in normal use it’s fine but I just noticed these big lags when pressing it to do what I would think it would breeze through (adding 3 or 4 albums and the favouring an artist).
I can perform such an accident twice or three times in a row and it’s not too bad of a lag and then on the 4th or 5th and beyond times it just lags for several minutes at times.
Again, my previous core install on my Synology’s HDD (not SDD) using a Celeron CPU was lagging just in regular use so I can’t complain now.
Nothing else going happening on the mac. No background tasks.
Local library (only ~1000) are on NAS’ HDDs - so networked yes for that, rest is just adding Qobuz albums and entire Roon core sits on this mac mini.
And yes, the Roon core is brand new and I’ve just added many albums to it so maybe it’s just the indexing and I’ll see how it goes over next period.
Applies only to the 512GB SSD version, and possibly barely noticeable outside of benchmark tests…
M1: 4,900 MB/s read and 3,951 MB/s write
M2: 2,973 MB/s read and 3,154 MB/s write
We had a number of M2 Mac’s in the office and user’s noticed that Large file saves were much slower on the 256GB SSD models. User’s with 512 GB were noticably faster especially Saving multi Gigabyte artwork.
From memory the 256GB model was a single memory chip where as the 512 used 2 x 256 GB running in parallel. We stopped buying the 256GB models as the users complained. Read into that what you want, but they knew 
None of the M1 Macs suffered from this issue, and I am very happy using my 16GB RAM and 256GB storage model, which I have been pleased using as a Roon server for the first time in the last week as I upgrade my NUC
As it was more than a year ago, I might have the disc sizes the wrong way around, but it would be strange for users to argue for smaller drives 
Ok, interesting. 16/512GB seems to be the sweet spot then. And M3’s predicted later in the year too 
Yeah, unfortunately I already own the M2 8/256 - it’s not a big deal most of the time as Roon performs fluidly - it’s just on certain tasks. Can’t be bothered.
Sorry, we went slightly off topic; and I don’t believe M1 vs. M2 is the cause of your slowness anyway. There are some good M1 Mac mini usage tips here:
I have a related question. I had Roon Server running on our Synology 918+ but found the performance too low. It worked sometimes very smooth and sometimes you had to wait for second to get a response. I have now moved the Roon Server to my Roon dedicated Mac Mini M1 8/256. It is much snappier to use, even with my music stored on the NAS and TIDAL. Now I wonder if changing to an M2 16/256 would impact the performance. Will it make Roon respond more rapidly to commands and (especially) searches?
Edit: I do own the M2 already, just need to invest the time and not sure if I should.
Not much time, really. Just load Roon on the M2, connect Tidal (don’t worry about setting up local files for a quick test) and try it out. Is it snappier? If NOT, then uninstall Roon and your done with the test.
I took the time today to backup the 8Gb M1 and the 16Gb M2 and then restored the M2 to the M1 and the M1 to the M2. Confused already? 
Anyhow, Roon Server is now running on the M2 Mac Mini and it is very snappy. Very happy with the result so far!
Experienced some of that. Just cleared up the M2, started over.