I am wondering if the Roon developers have looked at adding support for Intel’s Optane Persistent Memory? It is particularly interesting because it is persistent/non-volatile but has the characteristics of RAM, and having the Roon DB on it could significantly improve performance over having it on disk.
Note that Intel is doing a great job of confusing everyone with their terminology, and that there are effectively 3 Optane products:
- the disk that acts similarly to an SSD
- the “cache”, which annoyingly seems to get called “Optane Memory”, which is really the same as the first one albeit typically smaller in capacity
- the persistent memory (ie https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/270270-intel-announces-new-optane-dc-persistent-memory)
There are a couple of reasons why the last one is interesting (and excuse me if I get technical). Firstly it is persistent, so it is available immediately on system start up. Secondly, it is accessed directly, just like RAM (basically an mmap() operation), without a context switch, or system call. This makes it extremely fast for random accesses, and ideal for applications that are latency sensitive. Of course it does require some code changes on their end.
The Optane drives are certainly cool, and becoming affordable, and I am definitely looking into one for my Roon Core server (most likely one of the 32GB “cache” drives).
Perhaps a related question is, does the Roon Core attempt to load the entire database into RAM if there is enough available? Or does it just rely on the OSes buffercache? (The memory usage on my Roon Core seems to suggest the DB isn’t loaded into RAM explicitly).
NOTE: I have nothing to do with Intel, just happen to be excited about the new tech (professionally), and wondering if something in my hobby could benefit 