OSX Bad Perfornance - Temporary Fix

[Shawn_Empey]

Hi All

Not going to beat around the bush about the performance for Roon under OSX, its Bad. But I do have a temporary if you want to use the computer at the same time with roon running.

Recap:

This sluggish syndrome as been associated to network connectivity not just on wifi but hardwired. This is not the case. Issue has been present is several releases or Roon for OSX and any iteration of 10.11.x through to 10.15.x

Temp Fix: - Command- H : Hide the windows of the front app

Let me explain this and why it works. OSX uses the openCL rendering system for applications. Rendered via the GPU and some CPU. Hiding the application takes it out of the “queue” of things for the gpu to work with. Bring it back, and bang - system performance tanks again. Hide it again and boom the computer is responsive. This leads me to believe that Roon isn’t using the GPU for rendering and the interface is strictly done via a software render.

I would highly encourage the app devs to review with they have based their rendering in a software or poorly implemented port using openGL in a opencl wrapper.

[noris]

Hi @Shawn_Empey,

Welcome to the forum and thanks for the feedback here.

Could you please provide more information regarding the symptoms you are experiencing without doing a Command-H?

Are opening tracks/albums taking a while? Do you notice display artifacts? Perhaps a short video of the behavior would help us better understand the symptoms.

[wizardofoz (Mr Fix It aka The Wiz)]

Also for the record what is the system specs for this machine you running.

[mavmcl]

kind of feel you are reporting the same issue: macOS Catalina interface laggy randomly while running Roon (High GPU usage randomly, Roon idle 20% GPU, sometimes up to 99% usage)

Same initial symptom, macOS interface was slow and kind of unresponsive, then you do cmd W or close or minimize (cmd H) then macOS goes back to life.

Is your Mac reporting 100% GPU usage while having the issue?

[Shawn_Empey]

Completely agree you can see with this picture upload, the difference between roon open vs hidden night and day for the gpu

[Shawn_Empey]

Hi

See my picture below. GPU Activity monitor of Roon open vs hidden on a 2.7ghz 32gb ram mac mini. Same with my mac pro and i7 macbook. You folks have a brutal gpu rendering issue on your hands

[Fernando_Pereira]

FWIW, no problems with 13 in Macbook Pro early 2015 or Macbook Air 2020.

[noris]

Hi @Shawn_Empey,

We have been troubleshooting this issue primarily in the following thread, please see the current status from Dylan here:

macOS Catalina interface laggy randomly while running Roon (High GPU usage randomly, Roon idle 20% GPU, sometimes up to 99% usage)

Hi @mavmcl, First, I’d like to say that we appreciate your patience as we’ve continued to investigate this issue. After gathering data from a number of reports, as well as our own testing, we’ve traced this issue to a specific GPU series that appears to not be handling Roon how we’d expect. While we don’t have this resolved just yet, our QA team is in the process of acquiring this specific hardware for further internal testing in our labs. With this specific hardware in house, we believe we wi…