Persistent Nucleus+ Slow Performance and Occasional Playback Hangs (ref#HMIOLT)

[James_Denney]

Select your Nucleus model from the list below

· Nucleus+ Rev B

I'm having trouble with my Nucleus hardware

· Other

Select the option that fits best

· The Nucleus boots up and I can connect to it in the Roon app without issue, but I have a question about configuration/storage/attached devices

Describe the issue

I am experiencing three persistent issues with my Nucleus+.

1. Artist pages take ~10 seconds to load
* Happens for every artist
* Affects all remotes (iOS, macOS, Browser Display) wireless and wired/ethernet to router
* Happens every time, not intermittently
* Playback is fine mostly; UI browsing is the biggest issue
* Tested with all storage drives disabled → no improvement
* Appears to be related to image cache and slow roonlabs api responses looking at logs.

2. Nucleus+ takes over 10 minutes to boot
* When powering on or rebooting, the device can take 10+ minutes before becoming usable
* Sometimes it appears stuck for several minutes with no visible progress
* This has happened consistently over recent restarts

3. Occasional playback hangs & slow search
* Sometimes playback stops or hangs unexpectedly and/or loses core connection
* Happens on different outputs (AirPlay, Mac system output, local DAC)
* Not tied to a specific file or source
* Restarting the Roon Server process usually resolves it temporarily

What I’ve Already Tried
I’ve carried out extensive testing, including:

Storage / Database Tests
* Deleted extremely large Various Artist folders from Internal SATA drive to free space
* SATA Storage now ~74% full (~2TB free) , USB Storage ~40% full - [QLC QVO Drives]
* Disabled USB music drive → issue persists
* Disabled SATA music drive → issue persists
* Verified database is stored on internal NVMe
* Confirmed USB drive health (no errors; Linux FS detected)

Remotes / Network
*Turned off IGNP snooping which helped make the UI snappier for album page and search
*Different DNS servers
* Reinstalled iOS and macOS Roon apps
* Verified Browser Display (port 9330) works normally
* Tested behaviour across wired and WiFi remotes
* No change to symptoms

General
* Multiple Nucleus+ reboots and power cycles
* Verified router is functioning normally
* Playback hangs occur even on simple local endpoints

Describe Media
* Local mainly FLAC but some MP3/WAV files
* Large library = c300k tracks, c35k Albums
* Issue affects browsing and occasionally playback, not specific files
* Playback itself is generally fine except for the occasional hang


Summary
My Nucleus+ is showing three ongoing problems:
1. Artist pages consistently take ~8-10 seconds to load on all remotes
2. Very slow boot times — 10 minutes or more
3. Occasional playback hangs & slow search results

These issues continue even with 1/2 storage drives disabled, the database confirmed on NVMe, and multiple reboots and app reinstalls.

[alex_h (Alex)]

Good day @James_Denney !

I hope you’re doing well today.

Thanks for sharing your problem here.

We cannot retrieve a diagnostics data from your Nucleus to identify the issue precisely, but we can see that your Nucleus has almost 300k tracks.

Even despite you have already extended your RAM to 32 Gb it might be still a heavy load for Nucleus+ rev B.

Can we please ask you to make a backup of your database first.

Then please try to remove your default watched folder and replace it with some other folder which has up to 100k tracks.

And lastly reset your database as per this instruction:

• Stop RoonServer from running in Nucleus’s WebUI
• Navigate to your [Nucleus’ Database Location]( https://help.roonlabs.com/portal/en/kb/articles/database-location )
• Find the folder that says “RoonServer”
• Rename the “RoonServer” folder to “RoonServer_old”
• Restart the RoonServer in the WebUI to generate a new Database

After you do so please check and confirm whether it runs okay with smaller database ?

Looking forward to your reply!

Regards.

[James_Denney]

@alex_h

We cannot retrieve a diagnostics data from your Nucleus to identify the issue precisely, but we can see that your Nucleus has almost 300k tracks.

Hi

You can’t connect to it as I have retired it after testing m4 mac mini performance and finding it to be vastly superior for my library size.

I tried disabling one SSD location at a time which effectively reduced the library to 100k tracks and did not increase performance as detailed in my post.

Would you recommend that I persevere with the Nucleus or is it better to use the mini as server?

Thanks very much.

[alex_h (Alex)]

Good day @James_Denney !

The thing is not only the audio tracks itself.

mostly, performance issues are coming due to Database size.

If you wanted to test the performance of nucleus with smaller number of tracks you would need to create a new database too as per post from above and then check if it’s working any better. Just disabling the disk would not have much of sense.

Please try that.

In case after you cut the library size in your database too the performance gets better it means that the library size is too big for nucleus and you’d rather need to stick to some more powerful solution.

But please don’t forget to make a backup previously.

Have a nice day!

Regards.