Reducing RAM usage on QNAP NAS

Migration worked like a charm. Just another question - what is the possibility of reducing RAM usage?
Currently it’s:
RoonServer.sh - 616
RoonServer - 9396
RAAT Server - 13305
RoonAppliance - 428035

This is nothing specific to the QNAP installation.
RAM usage can probably be lowered by having a smaller music library.
But there is no general option to lower the RAM usage of RoonServer.

The installer for QNAP is just installing the regular RoonServer linux install in the right place and setting the environment.
It will consume as much RAM as on standard linux distrubutions.
If you feel Roon Server is consuming most of your RAM, you can check if you can equip your QNAP with more RAM.

Unfortunately my NAS cannot be equipped with more RAM (HS-251+1)
lI realize this is a general Roon Server topic / issue to address. Maybe are there other compiler options available that help reduce RAM usage?

Roon gets a lot of its performance by storing/indexing extensively in RAM. This is a design choice, and not something that is likely to change.

I’d be interested in the direct opposite, actually. I have 16Gb of good RAM, where Roon (the main application) only consumes about 1.5Gb.
There are opportunity to cache more stuff, either metadata or files being streamed.
But have you seen any issues with Roon since you desire less memory usage?
Atb Mike

@brian Today in times of SSD drives which provide huge data in an instant it would be great to have a switch / option to decide about RAM usage intensity.
One of the most widely used NAS of QNAP in the audio/multimedia segment (which is also completely silent / fanless) is the HS-251+ which has 2 GB RAM (and cannot be extended)

Instantaneous is relative. SSD access latency is orders of magnitude slower than RAM access. We would be re-building the portion of the software that relates to library management from scratch to make the shift you propose without destroying performance, and it would come with compromises.

Targeting users of underpowered NAS’s (it’s not just this one–our minimum requirements are an i3 + 4GB of RAM and most inexpensive NAS’s fall beneath that line) has never been a goal for us. Maybe someday that will be really important to our business–but that hasn’t been the case up until now.

To the extent that our hardware requirements are aggressive, the world will catch up–compute resources are becoming cheaper and more available more quickly than we expand our resource needs. This class of NAS will be faster next year, and even faster the year after that. At some point it will cross the line that makes it a good choice for Roon.

2 Likes

Your NAS is under recommended spec both in terms of CPU and memory (celeron V recommended minimum i3 and 2gb v recommended 4gb)

@brian I absolutely do understand your view - and think the same way :slight_smile: Wouldn’t make sense if you have to write the library management software from scratch. As you mention hardware performance is continuously improving, though even fast expanding is the requirements by software vendors. So no matter if you have 2 / 4 / 8 or whatever GB of RAM especially NAS hardware has to deal with quite a lot of stuff.
That is the point I was trying to make - if it would be quite easy to have a “quick fix” to just outsource one single, much RAM consuming part on SSD (with the tradeoffs mentioned, but that would people gladly take into account) like cover art or whatever it is, that would really help those users where their hardware is somewhat close to perfect or just where their lirbrary is really huge.