I have been a very happy user for a number of years and continue to love Roon. I wanted to get some support on optimising my local library to avoid the interface being much slower than it used to be. I now have about 7TB of local music on a Samsung 870 QVO 2.5" 8TB SATA 6 Internal SSD that is housed within my music server
Describe your network setup
Asus ZenWiFi Pro ET12 x2 (one connected to my Roon server), the other to my Sonore Signature Rendu SE Deluxe and Sonore opticalModule Deluxe
I am trying to go back to Roon being able to display information as quickly as it used to before I upgraded my SSD from 1TB to 8TBs.
The software feels far less smooth, irregardless of the music I am going through (whether stored locally or streamed via Qobuz and Tidal).
I suspect there must be a way to optimize my Roon server to be better able to handle the fact that it now stores a much larger database vs previously. I upgraded the RAM from 8 to 16GBs but continue to use the same i5 processor.
In other words I am trying to determine why Roon is now so much more sluggish and slow to load- both with local files and with loading Tidal/Qobuz descriptions, images etc.
I now need to wait for 4-5 seconds before I am able to play a new album. This was previously near instant
There are persistent reports that as libraries grow, those with very concentrated tree structures pointing to just a few or even just one root directory gradually experience performance issues. As libraries are growing at the same time as roon is releasing new versions, the performance deterioration is often miss-attributed to the new versions cycle. My experience is that roon performs much better with a flatter directory structure that is distributed over several disks and directory roots.
Libraries your size and larger are not common apparently so although this topic comes up from time to time, hard and fast recommendations for maximum directory sizes have never really been established to my knowledge.
Is your Roon Server dedicated only to Roon or is it used for other purposes? Also, you may want to consider more RAM given the size of your library. As @Rugby noted, at least an i7 would be a minimum consideration, but RAM may be easier to do first. Also, what size is the hard drive on which Roon Server is installed?
Good question. I have a main folder separated into 8 or so collection folders that are then separated into a large number of album specific folders each
Then, in effect you have 16,100 albums in a single folder tree.
There are no guarantees but I would start with raising your 8 subfolders up a directory level so that you have a much flatter directory structure with 8 main folder trees. Even that may not be enough and you may need to flatten your directory structure further. Unfortunately it is a bit suck it and see as local libraries your size are not common in roon so there is not much systematic advice although you will find threads on this topic if you search.
I’ve had a large library similar to the OP and Roon was once snappy and now it’s less so. Music folder structure should have little to do with performance degradation.
I’m in the process of restoring on my gaming laptop which has much more performant HW than my current Rock machine to see if it helps with performance and Airplay issues.
Is it possible to determine how much free space in on your OS drive? An 8 TB library with a long listening history may be consuming the available storage on the OS drive.
However, I have ended up flattening the directory structure across 3 physical disks each with 5 to 7 top level directories. That is, between 15 and 20 top-level directory trees for the whole library. This did not happen overnight but 7 years ago or so when first migrating from JRiver I soon ran into performance problems and started flattening larger directory trees and just carried on. For the most part I do not experience performance problems although I find roon certainly still struggles with certain types of searches.
Periodically this issue comes up and a common theme seems to be users with a single or very few directory trees which at a certain size/depth starts to impact roon performance. There are a small number of threads on this topic as it is only effecting larger libraries.
PS. Do not attempt to do this or something similar to this without thinking it through. Especially with a large mature library in which you have already invested years of effort. The basic strategy is to exploit roon’s “memory” of your old library and not to “clean” library in between directory migrations. If you are not careful roon will re-import and you will loose your edits. Obviously that would be a disaster for those with larger libraries so also make sure you have a couple of backups so you can roll-back if necessary.
Look, I don’t have much experience with Roon yet, but I think some things have been resolved here.
Strange things still happen, for example, I separated my library into:
Main directory
Box 1 to 7 (I have 7 boxes)
In each box I have:
Set 1 to 10 (I have 10 directories - with approximately 70 CDs in FLAC)
In each 7 I have the CDs ripped individually.
And since I only ripped - Album and Artist (thus creating exclusive folders) within each folder the songs from the CD.
After that, Roon still made a mess of the organization, so I followed some advice here:
I took all the CDs that had ‘Various’ in the Album Artist and also some of these CDs when I found the tags they were empty, in this case I replaced these CDs that had ‘various’ and blank with the name of the Album.
This solved the problem of separating, following this structure.
But for this, where the room searches for the songs, I didn’t get the main directory, but rather the ‘set’, which is where the CDs are physically located, so I was left with 70 folders in storage.
If I just get the box or general directory, Roon starts to group together CDs that are double or triple, etc., which ends up becoming a mess.
I want Roon to show me each CD independently, it doesn’t matter if it’s a double or triple.
I know this is quite complicated, but to make changes to the TAGs I used Medatics for MAC, which is cheap and does batch replacement.
Here’s my experience.
Went through this day-long process of moving everything up a level and getting Roon to rebuild the database.
While not as near instantaneous as before, it feels like the UI is back to a more snappy state. Definitely more manageable! I will also try and reduce the size of the library by getting rid of any duplicate albums.