Last weekend I set up a Synology 918+ for use serving up audio files and routine backup chores. I set it up Btrfs with 4 4TB WD Red discs, RAID 5, yielding around 11 TB of primary storage + redundancy–enough to keep me out of trouble for a while. I found it very easy–I expected a more technical process–and got Roon working with it right away. I plan to use this now as/for my main library.
Since installing it, I’ve noticed–intermittently–some slow-performance issues. Because it’s intermittent, I doubt the it has anything to do with the NAS. But it got me wondering whether there are some tweaks and settings for optimizing performance with Roon. (Most of what I see on this forum is about running Roon on the NAS–not just using it for storage.) Suggestions, anyone?
Generally speaking, max the RAM on the Synology. That will generally improve all aspects of performance on the NAS. Don’t bother with SSD caching; most “home” use cases do not benefit from it. Whereas the RAM will get used for OS block cache and make a pretty big difference.
You don’t say what your Roon Core is running on. Or what is intermittently slow. If its things like searches, that’s all on the Roon Core – the metadata library is not kept on the NAS.
Yes, especially searches, populating search pages with images. Would outboarding the files to the NAS (from an SSD connected to the core) be expected to slow down search significantly?
It has been a while since I built my NUC, but I think it’s an i3–yes, 6i3. It’s not powerful, but then I’m not especially demanding of speed from my core. Still, that’s an obvious place to upgrade.
ALL Roon metadata, including images for album art, artists, etc., is stored on the Core. None of this is accessed from your NAS, except when scanning/importing new music. Search performance is 100% a function of the Core. Rendering of search results is also somewhat dependent on the Roon Remote system’s capabilities (how much of an image cache it allows, GPU to draw the results, etc.)
Roon doesn’t give you the option to move the metadata library location, especially for ROCK. If you installed the Core on your own OS installation, even then you can only really move it using mountpoints or symlinks (for Linux systems) or reparse points (for Windows).
The 6i3 should be pretty reasonable for a Roon Core, unless you have an absolutely gargantuan library. What is the drive the OS is installed on in the NUC? That’s the drive the metadata library is stored on. I presume an SSD of some sort?
OK, so tonight I’m having a very bad experience. Music is cutting out–from Qobuz and from my own library. The fact that I haven’t had such an experience all week makes me think the problem is not with the NAS installation. There could always be Internet issues that effect Qobuz, but the local network seems to be very healthy. Everything except the remote is Ethernet-wired: So what would cause musc to cut out between the NAS, the core, and the DAC? But it has happened repeatedly: a few seconds of a song–cuts out–tries the next song–and so on.
Where is the library stored? It has been so long since I’ve fooled around with this that I don’t remember how it works. There is a substantial internal SSD inside the NUC. I think it was 512, since when I first built the NUC I made the library internal. I only moved it outside when I went to Roon ROCK. But the library is probably still on that large internal SSD.
Oh, and my library is pretty modest-sized, some 30,000 tracks.
You state you are using ROCK. The library is stored on the same drive as the ROCK OS. You cannot change this, or even look at the library files directly, since ROCK locks you out of everything. The library is not your music; it is just the metadata about the music. Your music files are stored somewhere else from the library (be it a second internal drive in the NUC, an external USB drive, or from a network share on your NAS).
That you say you had problems with Qobuz cutting out proves that the NAS is not the issue, as the NAS is not involved in streaming from Qobuz in any way, shape, or form.
I would suggest you contact @support and have them pull logs from your Core and hopefully from that they can identify what is causing your performance issues.