Please explain your issue. Also how big is your library? What other tasks / software is setup/running on your NAS?
Synology says that this NAS supports RAM expansion with a 4GB module for a total of 6GB. Intel says that this CPU supports a maximum of 8GB. So part of your problem could potentially be related to a hardware incompatibility and you most likely can’t get official support (from Synology), for this or any other issue you may eventually run into in the future, for your unsupported setup (read: any problems you face may be due to your unsupported RAM setup, please change to a supported setup before we look any further into this) as well.
A real USB SDD (Hard)Drive or a simple USB Flash Drive (aka USB-Stick, Thumb Drive)?
Roon is not running so smooth as 3-4 months ago - the same NAS configuration, shooting down for few seconds, troubles searching songs, loading albums for 20-30 seconds etc
Reinstall Roon helping for few hours
Roon Core on adata ssd disc - connected via USB. The same RAM for 3 years, without lately change anything.
Everything else running on my Nas without any problems (PLEX etc)
What troubles? But anyway, searches are Roon cloud based – so unlikely your issues here are related to your Roon Server platform (NAS).
Loading for view/display or loading for playback? Also what’s the source for the albums (streaming service or local files). Here again, if the source is streaming then it is unlikely your issues here are related to your Roon Server platform (NAS).
Your “etc” still needs clarification
This can be an indicator that memory consumption of Roon has become too much for the RAM available on your NAS. Check the resource consumption (CPU and Memory usage by processes) on your NAS when your situation becomes noticeably degraded. Feel free to also answer the asked question as their answer may be relevant too:
My library is ca 5000 albums, 80 000 tracks
Roon is slowing down mainly when I want to change the song, when it is playing- there are no problems.
Most difficult for roon is to play few songs in a short period (when I want to change song after 10-15s)
If behavior is the same when skipping local tracks and the queue clear helps then this might be a sign that your platform reaches its limits. An upgrade to a more capable platform for Roon Server may be your best choice but please don’t pull the trigger based on my sole opinion. Try to get some opinions from other users with similar or bigger libraries as well first. Also try to project your future needs (what is your expected library size in 3 years, 5 years, …).
Roon seems to have a bit of a performance problem right now, especially for users with bigger libraries (50k+ tracks). The team seems aware and is searching for a solution but there is no time-frame currently and we also don’t know how much of a relieve a solution may present.
Also your search issue is likely unrelated to your current hardware and upgrading would therefore don’t help with that.
I’ve got nearly 49,000 (local) tracks on a 1522+ (5 bay version of 923+, but I have 16gb of RAM) with no issues in sight. Smooth as butter. I’m still not clear if @Yimu_Shen has got his Roon database on an SSD. At this point, that may be important despite my earlier statement.
Hi -when searching - Roon use about 25-30% of my CPU, when playing about 3%, the Ram usage is the same all the time - about 3.8 gb (i have 10gb in my DS 720+)
i’am wondering - 16gb will help/improve Roon performance?
I dont want to change my Synology to DS723+ because of it’s AMD R1600 (Plex issues)
Greetings
In total or just Roon? For comparison, this figure is about my system total – and my Roon library is much smaller than yours. The needs for your Plex installation are unknown and we also don’t know what other software you run on your system. I expect your total to be 2GB - 4GB (or more) over mine.
I already pointed out the situation with your RAM.
You’re already above what is specified for your system and I don’t know if it can actually handle and use the current excess memory capacity properly.
We also still don’t know about your plans for the future. Will your library grow bigger and how much how quick? Same goes for Plex. Your needs may probably definitively outgrow your current system in a foreseeable future.
PS: Are there 14GB modules available nowadays? Or how do you want to get to 16GB? Maybe you meant 18GB instead? Anway, it’s far more than specified for your system and I don’t know if this will work at all.
I think a two core CPU like the R1600 would be a step back and totally go for a 4 core (or more) CPU on a NAS to ensure I don’t run into a bottleneck here but others are happy with this CPU.
Maybe you have to look at other brands too to find the optimal solution for your situation.
You should listen to this, @Lukasz_Stach. Your NAS supports a maximum of 6GB which is 2GB onboard plus a single 4GB non-ECC SO-DIMM. If you try to put more than this into your device, which it sounds like you already have, the best case is that it will work as well as it would work if you just put a 4GB DIMM in. That’s the best case. The worst case is that you cause performance or functional problems. You will accomplish absolutely nothing by putting even more in.
This reminds me of an old Mac programmer’s joke: “Don’t write to the ROM. It wastes your time and annoys the ROM.” You sort of have to understand how old Macs work to get it
It sounds to me as if the CPU is already reaching its limits with such a library. If the CPU usage is for several seconds hitting 25-30% while performing typical single-core operations, it translates to the one core being overly busy and slowing things down.
While the Celeron J4125 is not a bad CPU, it it a typical quad-core with single core performance not really great for roon. I had a similarly powerful (in terms of single-core performance) Celeron based NAS and everything beyond 70k tracks was leading exactly to the problems you describe. Disable a part of your library, perferably the difficult parts for roon such as unidentified albums, DSD or multi-disc albums, and you most probably will see it will work fine again.
Or switch to an AMD R1600 based NAS if the Plex issues can be solved. That is a textbook single-core performant CPU, ideal for running a bigger library up to 125k tracks approx if you have enough of RAM. All the Synology models based on that CPU are very smooth according to my experience (DS1522+, DS723+, DS923+ and alike).
Roon alone eating up in the region of 3.8GB of RAM while handling an 80k library is absolutely within the range what is expected. My core library is a bit smaller, around 65k tracks, and roon´s RAM usage can be everything between 2.4GB and 3.4GB.
For roon the opposite is true. A dual core CPU with beefy single-core performance gives a much snappier and instantaneous roon experience than a quadcore with limited computing power on a single core. You would never reach the limits of a dualcore if you do not perform crazy multi-room stunts like 6 simultaneous DSD-with-EQ or PCM-to-DSD256 streams or run computing heavy tasks like video crosscoding on the same NAS at the same time.
This is what I was expecting. So with my expectation of his system using 2GB - 4GB (or more) more in total, we are speaking of 6GB - 8GB (or more) in total which reaches or even beats the specification for the device and leaves little to nothing at all and already swapping (if Synology supports that), depending on if it is capable of using the total amount of installed RAM or not.
If he wanted to have the best solution for Roon and Roon alone (a dedicated Roon server) he should and probably would (because he knew the recommendations already) have never decided to setup Roon in his home on a less than ideal platform like a purpose (storage of data) designed NAS that he also chose to run other demanding software on.
The high single-core performance recommendation mainly stems from the fact that Roon uses a single core per stream/zone for playback which, when a lot of DSP needs to be done on a stream, may be too demanding for a CPU with slow single core performance. Most demanding in this regard is likely the processing of DSD streams and especially for those Roon allows to enable parallel processing of the work load, so perfectly manageable with more cores. Nowhere Lukasz gave a hint that he’s currently limited in this regard by his Celeron CPU though, so I assume he’s fine with a CPU with lower per core performance.
Let’s assume we have such a case where a single stream uses practically all of a single core’s performance. On a dual core CPU this leaves only one core left to process all the other processing requests on the system: Roon (non playback related UI and DB tasks for example), other software on the NAS that doesn’t stop running just because Roon needs a lot of resources currently and the OS with its various sub processes including storage and network management and request processing (both potentially busy currently because Roon is playing). So a lot of process shuffling has to be done (time-sharing of limited amount of resources) which also costs time. You may shortly run out of steam on a “single” core system that has to run a lot of things simultaneously and time critical media playback may stutter or stop. That is why I recommend to use at least a quad-core processor for NAS based Roon setups where, like in this case, the NAS would still be used to serve other processes too besides Roon. And for dedicated Roon servers I’m sure better platforms exists than a typical NAS.
He would also not reach the limits of quad core too. But if he would do both of the above, each using a core for the task, on a quad core you still have two cores left for all the other installed apps and the OS.
Note: It’s hard to predict the exact needs of systems we know so little about (setup, software, usage patterns, …). We here may know Roon very well but we might not know much about Plex and we for sure don’t know about other potentially important specifics as they were never shared. So my recommendation is based on my experience and based on “better being save than sorry”.
Roon and Plex have different requirements for good servers (good performance for all features) which of course may be ignored if someone knows his specific needs better.
QNAP suggests these models for Roon and these for Plex. Listed as recommendation for both applications is only the TVS-x72XT Series (smallest model is the TVS-472XT-i3-4G (Note: I wouldn’t go for any of the other variants of the TVS-472XT as they are marked as “Leagcy”, so already quite a distance on their way out of support). With upgraded RAM (16GB minimum) this seems to be a solid recommendation for Roon given his current library size and offering the opportunity to grow and Plex should be happy with it too. The TVS-h674-i3-16G may work as well too.
PS: I was unable to find a comparable model from Synology on a quick look.
Looks to me that the CPU identifies and allocates the additional memory properly. With the 6 GB setup, the memory utilization was much higher.
If this huge memory does anything to improve performance, I cannot tell. The two 258 GB m2. SSDs as caches did.
I just wanted to jump in to say that I’ve moved my core recently to a new Synology 923+ in the past week.
Prior to this platform, the core was on a laptop running Promox utilising a ROCK setup as a VM. The laptop had 32GB RAM and a i7-9 series CPU and SDD etc. And previous to that one, on a Windows laptop i5-8300, 16GB RAM, SSD etc
From my perspective, I’ve seen no performance change between any of these setups. I’ve just installed a 16GB module in to the NAS so i have a bit more head room with things, but honestly, things were running happily on 4GB. I have also installed a couple of old m2 256GB as cache, which potentially helps things. I don’t have the database specifically installed on a SSD, however i understand that the database is likely to end up in the cache.
I don’t do any DSP, and my library is small comparatively at 7000 tracks between NAS and Qobuz. However I’m so happily suprised at this solution and am very glad I took the punt. Happy to answer any questions if you are still on the fence.
Would not say that, as a properly equipped NAS can make a decent and smooth base for a roon core if library size and performance-relevant specs are matching reasonably. I agree that 6GB max of RAM is not plenty but Synology OS is also not commonly known for wasting RAM. A library of 80k should run smoothly on that one if the CPU is capable, but 8GB would be more on the safe side.
That is one factor, but for a snappy and reactive experience, the single-core performance (plus burst, I assume) is as important. Lots of operations such as skipping tracks, establishing a stream, compiling album view, composer’s site, composition list, coverflow and alike are processed by a single core according to my experiments. That is where a CPU below the minimum specs is most likely to peak for several seconds causing delays and stutter.
As far as I have experienced it, except from intense search queries there are no common operations causing roon to run all cores parallely.
Processing of DSD is not such a problem once the stream is established. It either works, or it does not. Applying DSP operations to DSD or transcoding from PCM to high-frequency DSD (DSD256 or DSD512) is eating up more computing power, in my understanding.
I had such system for years, in single-core performance comparable to Lukasz´ machine. In practice it is not a problem unless you have a bigger library (50k+ tracks) and run several (>5) computing-heavy streams simultaneously and are trying to do other operations. That is not really a realistic scenario outside a very big home or hi-fi studio or alike.
Yes, he obviously has reached the limits of the quad-core already, and that is mainly a problem of reaching the limits of a single ore. CPU usage of 25-30% (i.e. total peaking of one core in most cases roon is showing problems) and delays/stuttering when starting a stream or skipping within a queue/playlist are the single biggest hints lack of single-core CPU power is the main issue here.
Unlike some people think, it is not a general problem of Celerons in general and quad cores in particular. The more current Celeron models offer pretty decent single-core performance due to higher thermal reserves, I assume. Celeron G6900 is perfect for roon, and N5095/5105 are very good if you do not have a crazy library exceeding 100k tracks.
i3 and i5 based QNAPs are for sure powerful enough to handle roon, especially the current models. But they are surely not necessary for a library of that size (80k tracks). Same it true to more than 8GB of RAM which is absolutely sufficient (not sure about 6GB, that might be reaching its limits).
If one is not expecting crazy multiroom stunts (like running >5 simultaneous PCM>DSD256 streams), an AMD R1600 equipped NAS allowing for 8 (or more if your library exceeds 150k tracks) GB of RAM is sufficient by any means. If you want to stay with Synology, choose DS723+, DS923+ or 1522+. They all work smoothly.
Glad to hear your system is running smoothly, but with 7,000 tracks this would be expected even from an outdated or less powerful NAS with just 4GB of RAM. According to my experience your library needs to be in the region of 50 or 60k tracks to really notice a difference, with everything exceeding that really putting the CPU under stress. Not your systems, of course, they seem to have plenty of reserves.
And you are still talking about Roon only. Why I agree with your assessment of the platform as a dedicated Roon server device, this is obviously not what it is used for in the currently discussed case. It is supposed too run other tasks too, namely Plex, and still perform well and always have enough resources to process requests in a timely manner. As I wrote before, there are better options to run a dedicated Roon server than a NAS that was designed and built to mainly serve storage (related) demands.
Is not an option for Lukasz, as he already stated, because it lacks a GPU suited for hardware transcoding of videos with Plex. In my opinion Synology is the wrong brand for a powerful media server running Plex or similar and Roon and likely other applications too (unless your libraries and other requirements/expectations are very very low) – they just don’t have suitable hardware offerings.
QNAP on the other hand cares about such use cases and even provides recommendations for it.
Given his current needs and if he wants to stay with Synology his best option would likely be to buy a new AMD based NAS for Roon and keep the current NAS for Plex.
