Recommendation for a large library

Dear Neil_Russell
Thank you for your help
I am currently using an iMac
I am considering to get a Dell Optiplex with the specs that I mentioned earlier

I am sorry I gave you a wrong information. It might not suit your case but I am running my roon core on a ROCK machine not Windows. Sorry for the confusion.

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I was using an i7-7700 16GB with SSD boot on W10 but my library is a little smaller at 270K tracks (250K of this is local) and via internally installed 16TB SATA3 drive.

My Mobo/CPU died and I upgraded to the same as you are considering with i7-10700 CPU and used back the same SSD boot for windows 10 and the 16TB drive plus the 2133 DDR4 ram.

All went fine and this is in a fanless HDPlex chassis with HDPLex 200W LMPS. performance is solid and is only used headless as a Roon Server.

IMHO I think you should be OK with the i7-10700 and while I find 16GB is fine 32/64 might buy you a little headroom on a larger database.

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Thank wizardofoz
So mainly you are dedicating the machine for the Roon server.

It seems using the same PC for both (the core and opening other apps) is not highly recommended with larger libraries. But why Roon excels with Windows and not with macOS in these situations. The M1 chip is capable and outperforms the i7 in the tests.

My library: 28000 albums / 500,000 tracks.
Roon ROCK is running on a dedicated fanless NUC (Core i7, 16GB Ram, 256GB SSD).
All music files (and the Roon backups) are on a NAS (Synology DS1819+ with 92TB drive space, 16GB Ram and 2x400GB SSD raid cache).

All connections are via Ethernet and a Gigabit switch.
Everything works without problems or issues. Search results are returned almost instantly.

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I tried on a 8gb m1 mini 512 ssd and it couldn’t cope swapping out to disk all the time.

I use win10 as I sometimes use other win based software plus I used to optionally run as a rock system on the old Mobo

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I think it is a lot more involved issue than just hardware horsepower. You might want to take a look at the following discussion:

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Thank you Patrick_Van_Osta for you help

For what it’s worth I have the following setup:

474,686 tracks

Synology DS1520+ NAS with 8GB Ram

Nucleus Plus with 16GB Ram

Search and playback via Roon Remote on iPad Pro or on Windows 10

Searching generally takes about 5 seconds or so, but depends on the query and can be longer. Given the size of the database I find that acceptable. Narrowing searches via Filter is much quicker.

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I posted this in the support and it was shifted to Roon Software
I am not sure why the support ignored my questions
The support can verify from my email that I have a valid Roon subscription

Likely as its not a support type issue.

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Thank you wizardofoz

I think your problem (which is really Roon’s problem IMO) is your Mac. I have over 225,000 tracks in my library and when I was running Roon core on an i7 MacMini (all music data stored on a NAS), I had all kinds of problems with slow performance, audio interruptions et al. Moved Roon core to an Intel i7 NUC (running Roon under Windows) and all my problems went away. My conclusion is that Roon code doesn’t run all that well on Mac hardware, especially if you have a big library.

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I have a very large library with over 830K local tracks (all flac) stored on USB hard drives. Roon core is on a Windows 10 computer with an i7 processor and an MME drive with 64GB RAM.

All of the above suggestions are very good and several are worth repeating.

Search speed is generally pretty quick but at times can be very slow. The slowdown is usually as a result of, as @anon90297517 stated, Roon’s “cloud dependencies”. If and when that happens I either suffer with the slow speed or just restart Roon. Restarting usually solves the speed issues.

Another issue is the short wait that can be experienced while an external hard drives comes up to speed. I don’t know if Roon prefetches the next track, as does LMS, but if not then prefetching should be high on the feature request list.

Two other important things are lots of RAM and Roon core installed on a solid state drive.

One other note. The computer that my Roon core is installed on is also used to process the files to be added to Roon (tagging, art work, etc.) and also runs Plex for my video library. And everything is connected via Ehternet since WiFi produces nothing but headaches.

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I’ve run my much smaller library (10k albums and 100k tracks) on Windows 10, ROCK and Ubuntu. Not directly comparable but the technologies used on Windows and maybe? ROCK allow better performance, namely .NET vs. Mono that is used with Linux and MacOS. Windows is hands down far more responsive (for me) than ROCK or Ubuntu all with the same library running on the same hardware i7-6700, 16GB, SSD (sata) for OS. I would just swap boot devices to compare easily.

You could try a virtual Windows instance on your Mac as a test. No need to activate/license Windows just to host RoonServer. You won’t be able to customize some things but none that really matter to the use.

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That post from Danny dates from 2017. Now he is saying that the lightest/fastest Roon systems run on Roon OS (ROCK/Nucleus):

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Not in my experience. Windows is noticeably more responsive for me on my hardware.

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Thank you
Bob_Lindstrom
Ralph_Pantuso
Larry_Post
Geoff_Coupe
For you input on this
I really appreciate it :slight_smile:

I experienced with Dirk_De_Taey suggestion, it really made a difference on my iMac, but i5 is already a slow machine now, so I can not do other basic things, so I will be changing it.
I am not sure what is the sweet spot (number of tracks to avoid these issues), less than 200k?
I think I have to do more segregation for my Library between Arabic and Non-Arabic music on my local library - I can take this further by adding Classical into separate folders
I will try to find software similar to Swinsian that can help me do this transition because I might be stuck with the tags again, if someone can suggest an alternative it will be great.
Thanks a lot.

[From their website]

About Roon
THE ULTIMATE MUSIC PLAYER FOR MUSIC FANATICS

I think this is what attracts the customers in addition to the compatible Roon-ready devices/HiFi gear.
Personally, I believe that asking people to find out solutions for hardware such as servers and different setups is a bit too much.