I installed ROON Server on QNAP TS-251D NAS + Database on external SSD and it always worked fine!!
now its happnes, after installing the 2.5Gb network card in the NAS, every time I start ROON Desktop from any device:
Minisforum UM250 mini PC with 16Gb RAM and connected to the stereo system with DAC
PC i5 connected to a DAC + active speakers,
or to remotely manage with an iPad or Android phone
the system remains on standby for a long time “Waiting for your Roon Server”
After several minutes 10 -30min or more, trying to restart it several times, it finally connects, but it happens that I can’t find the devices, as they are not on the list.
When he finally succeeds, there happens to be a further interruption with the message:
“Uh oh, something’s not right. Make sure your Roon Server is turned on…”
In the end, when it connects, everything works perfectly!!!
Furthermore I notice that from the NAS when I open the ROON Server it takes time to display the info.
While accessing the MUSIC folder on the NAS is always very fast and everything works fine if I use JRiver to listen to music.
Is there a solution or how can I fix it?
Should I try reinstalling the ROON Server on my NAS?
Thank you very much for your support.
You can try that, just make sure to create (and test) a backup first.
Note: QNAP’s websites tells me that your NAS is “legacy” and phasing out of support going forward. Has a 2 cores / 2 threads processor only (limited CPU resources your new network card might tap into {too much}). Was sold with either 2GB RAM (barely suitable for running Roon Server and minimal library of some demo songs/albums) or 4GB RAM (recommended minimum for running Roon Server on a NAS especially if the NAS is used for other stuff too). Did you upgrade the Memory maybe to make the NAS more suitable for Roon?
So far I rate that NAS as a bare minimum configuration so depending on your library size alone you may already run into issues and the new network card may just be a coincidence. It can also be that the new network card taps into the very limited resource pool of that NAS too much which leads to your issues, in which case you could only eventually do something to improve the situation if it were RAM related (QNAP rates the NAS for 8GB). Lastly, as we don’t know any details, the network card might not be compatible with your NAS (not on QNAP’s compatibillity list for your NAS) and therefor cause the issues you noticed.
Open the Qnap browser Remote Desktop and log in as an admin, or do the same via Qmanager app on a device in the same network with the NAS. Either with the resource monitor or the designated QBoost app you can see details of RAM consumption. Roon Server should be the app consuming most of RAM while system applications usually stay combined well below 500MB of RAM consumption. Roon will consume at least 1.5GB or more.
It is a good indicator if the Roon server app is actually running.
The second variant is to open roon app in AppCenter and see if everything is working fine. It might get stuck when booting up due to corrupted internal database, network problems or alike.
Did you install roon server app on the external drive as well? Or just installed it from AppCenter and pointed it to the external SSD path for its internal database?
The unit has a decent yet outdated J4005 Celeron CPU and is perfectly capable of running roon with a limited number of tracks (<30,000) and zones.
4GB of Ram is absolute minimum, 8GB recommended. Note that the Qnap will use virtual swap memory on a storage volume the moment it is running out of physical RAM. If that process is involving magnetic drives (you mentioned having solely external SSD), it gets really slow.
The Qmanager app is highly recommended as it has a RAM section in the resource monitor menu which allows you to monitor not only the current RAM consumption but also how much RAM was swapped over the course of the last minutes.
I’ve had the same problem but on much more robust hardware (TVS-h1688x). The answer is memory consumption. The Roon app is one of the more memory hungry apps you can run. Mine right now is sitting at 1.38GB although I’ve seen it over 2 GB previously. And while I have 96 GB of RAM, I run so much stuff on my NAS that I was getting close to my RAM limits and Roon clients were having the same “Waiting for Server” problems. If I stopped running other stuff, Roon got better.
It is the most likely cause of slowdown, but not the only one.
Very much depends on the number of tracks in your library and complexity of roon´s internal database. With 100k+ tracks and lots of artists, interdependencies etc., expect roon server app to eat up 6GB or more of RAM.
I wonder which other processes eat up 90GB of RAM simultaneously, if there is no ongoing memory leak. Does your machine swap RAM automatically and did you make sure it does so using fast SSD volumes? In this case you should not even notice RAM consumption exceeding the 96GB.
If you run that many hungry processes, I would assume that other resources like CPU, networking and storage volumes are pretty busy as well which might be another cause of roon slowing down or stalling. It is not always RAM.
I should have been more specific. I run a Plex server, 7 different containers including Oracle 23i database, and three different VMs including a Windows 11 and Windows Server. That’s a good way to drain 96 gigs of RAM.
Wow, that is really impressive a single NAS could handle all this virtual computing load. Another proof that QNAP machines should be taken as serious IT equipment and not ´toy file server´. Particularly virtual Win11 machines with their designated clients might eat up not only RAM but also CPU power and networking bandwidth.
I am not aware if it is possible to run roon server in a separated container or assign guaranteed bandwidth/CPU cores to it, otherwise my guess would be that such an environment is not ideal for roon.
