As I have shared a few times in earlier postings, my ROCK server based on NUC 7i5 has been suffering from slow search. I’ve just set up a Ubuntu Roon server based on old 2013 trash can MacPro (Xeon E5 Quad-core), and it is much more bearable now. The benchmark “the the” search turns out results in 17-19 sec (my ROCK would take up to 1 min). My library size is about 10k albums and 130k tracks (50/50 hard disk and streaming contents).
My question is: would a new ROCK server built on NUC 13ANHi7 be noticeably faster? I see the spec comparison for 7i5 (2 cores at 3.4 GHz turbo) versus 13ANHi7 (12 cores at 5.0 GHz turbo) quite promising. I am willing to buy and build another ROCK server, but I’d like to know for sure that this will definitely improve the situation.
Lastly, has anyone compared the performance of ROCK NUC 13ANHi7 versus Nucleus Titan? I suspect that they share about the same hardware specs. Anyone who knows about the secrets of the new Titan?
As one data point, @CrystalGipsy when running Roon Server on DietPi (instead of ROCK) observed that search uses many/all cores, so the 14 vs 2 cores may well provide considerable improvement (in addition to the much better single core speed)
I can confirm that limiting Roons access to the number of core’s in DietPi has a significant impact on things like search speed, more is usually better along with single core performance, so giving Roon all the power is very helpful to a good experience.
The biggest limiting factor to Roons speed in my experience is the Metadata update performance. When this runs (which you cannot control) it doesn’t matter how fast you’re machine is, it is mostly using one or two cores and Roon slows to a crawl including browsing the interface and starting playback.
It doesn’t impact everyone and seems to impact some libraries more than others.
Roon staff are very quiet on what causes this to kick off and there is nothing you can do unless you wait it out or restart Roon.
Thankfully it doesn’t happen that often, but it is annoying when it does.
My library is considerably smaller than yours (~1500 albums), so may not be applicable or useful, but, running on a 7i7 it takes about 3 seconds for that search.
Have you cleaned your library (setting/library ‘clean up library’) and deleted image cache (setting/setup ‘clear cache’) and tried reinstalling the OS from the webUI?
I also wonder if you did a fresh install of ROCK, or at least a DB “reset” and then an OS reinstall from the webui then re-import of all music, if the search might speed up?
If you are considering a new NUC it might be worth a try before you spend the money?
And as far as I understand Roon OS, every update is actually a complete atomic reinstall of the OS, anyway. If the issue is somehow in the DB, an OS reinstall in any form won’t make a difference, either.
