I’m surprised to find that my ROCK install has resulted in a noticeably slower Roon experience than with the same hardware running Windows 10 .
I’m using a NUC6i5, Samsung NVME internal storage with music on a USB external drive. Browsing, selecting etc was blazing fast when Windows was installed, but there is a noticeable delay now that I’m using ROCK. It’s not horrific or anything, but the “loading album” graphic is definitely on screen for quite a bit longer and drawing a screen of album covers is significantly slower.
I was under the impression that ROCK’s main selling point would be its speed, but I’ll probably be reverting back to Windows if it doesn’t improve (not sure why it would).
I have a similar experience but not with the same hardware… I was running Roon core on a core i7 Win 10 Laptop before I switched to ROCK on a NUC7i3BNH (Transcend 128GB SSD/Crucal 4GB/Internal 1TB Seagate).
Everything works just fine but loading the album covers while browsing my collection on any remote is much slower now.
It loads the first row fast, it waits a little and then shows the remaining rows. (all still in 1-2 seconds).
Once the remote has all the covers in memory it works fine. (but happens after every remote restart)
I chose the i3 because my collection is small (600 albums) but didn’t realize that the UX on the remotes would be impacted. I can live with it (have to) but would not recommend it to anyone because the snappiness is gone. I would recommend the i7 if that is what it takes.
@Dirk_Op_de_Beeck-- the NVMe SSD is like 10x faster than the Transcend SSD – that explains the difference. The covers are located in the Roon database, which lives on the SSD.
Thanks @danny! Yep, I guess I was spoiled with that drive. I won’t go back though. ROCK is awesome!
I’ll use it for a while like this until these NVMe drives drop in price some more. That will be a great little upgrade some day.
Late reply sorry. I’ve been hoping performance would improve but unfortunately no change. It’s just a general lower level of responsiveness and snappiness compared to my Win10 install on the same hardware. More “hourglass” screens appearing for longer, that kind of thing.
USB enclosure is one of these, connected to one of the rear ports on the NUC.
I have two of them and they’re always reliable for me (unlike some other enclosures). External music drive is a WD Red 6TB.
Again, all hardware is exactly the same as when I was running Win10. I have ~55k tracks & I do wonder whether mono is up to the job as well as .Net. Anyway, I’m planning on rolling back to Win10, although I don’t think the free 7 > 10 upgrade exists any more so I may have to buy a license .
If you make a clean install of the same version of windows 10 that you used to have and login with your microsoft account, It activates automatically. It says on the activation page that the activation is digitally linked to your microsoft account.
You can download your appropriate version of windows iso from microsoft.com
just a guess, but although the hardware is the same, when you swap Windows for Linux (ROCK) the drivers will be different for the USB3 interface. When USB3 came out I recall reading about driver performance issues with USB 3 enclosures connected to NAS devices in particular. They performed really poorly due to poorly written drivers.
Don’t know if ROCK has anything that can be enabled to monitor I/O throughput as a test? However, rereading your issues, it sounds like a problem inside the NUC not outside.
I suspect this might also be related to worse NTFS performance on Linux, and/or performance differences among Linux kernel versions for USB mass storage.
I have exactly the same experience. I had previously installed Roon on the PIPO X8 Windows10 e Android 4.4 Intel Z3736F Quad Core Dual Boot OS (2 GB + 32 GB). And now I have ROCK on NUC5i7RYH, Intel Iris, 16GB RAM, 120GB SSD, music storage on QNAP NAS. I’m very disappointed with the performance on the new NUC with ROCK. There is not much difference in performance on both devices. But I still think Roon is the best !!! I will try to install it on NAS in near future.
I can’t see a NAS being anything but slower for Roon Core; most have low power processors, even the high end Intel ones. Lots of other stuff running on them at the same time too.
The Intel NUC5i7RYH blows the Intel Z3736F out of the water… they are in totally different leagues. But then again, your statements are really unclear… are things slower or faster in one situation vs the other?
The OS and Roon DB lives on the ROCK SSD’s Ext4, and after a while, this includes al the cover art too. NTFS shouldnt make a difference here… maybe during scanning, but not in normal operation.
I’m personally running 120k+ tracks on ROCK, and I have no issues once I’m up and going… it’s obviously slow when starting up but thats what I get for having so many tracks. I have no slowness with covers or search/filter/etc…
I am a ROCK user who is very happy with the move, previously being a W10 user on the same hardware and a PiPO X9S. My NUC is 5th generation so no NVMe, and a little slower than its generation 7 successor. Should we be looking at this more analytically? Why is this working for me and others but not for them?
Indeed, I’m sure we could fill the thread with “mine’s fine” / “mine’s slow” comments, but it would be good to understand if there is any way we can analyze processes etc on ROCK?
Also, I don’t want to overstate the issue. For someone new to Roon, going straight to ROCK, they’d probably be perfectly happy with the performance of my system. Of course, the problem for me is that I’m coming from a previous build that was noticeably snappier and it’s hard to give that up.
It is hard to describe all the things in English for me. First of all when I switch between tracks it takes quite long to start playing it. My library is about 50k tracks. It happened to lose the audio zone couple of times and I don’t remember I had it before on Pipo. The same is with my Ipad it searches longer for the Roon after switching it off and sometimes I have to select it manuały, it didn’t happened before. I had few freezes on Ipad with both setups. I run on the restored backup from Pipo and maybe this causes some problems in NUC.
As I mentioned before it doesn’t discourage me to Roon I will try other options and I am considering more and more on installing Roon on a proper NAS.
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