I recently upgraded my MacBook Pro 2021 to the new M4 with 48GB memory – a second computer on which I control my library of nearly 700,000 tracks from a sitting position while doing my daily work. I find that search, play and adding new albums from Qobuz now all snap to attention immediately. This confirms the report of a friend of mine who has a library 3 times the size who has had considerable woes over the years and first upgraded to a Mac Mini with maximum configuration that gave him considerable improvement and recently to the new Mac Studio which has given him the performance that I am now experiencing on the latest MacBook Pro Max
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This is quite valuable information and also a bit disheartening. As there is a lot of systems out there for playing large music libraries and requires far less power to handle large libraries.
This means that a lot of people would have to make a considerable investment to ensure proper performance from their music server and Library.
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Yes, and I have a quite beefy setup with Xeon server processors and 128Gb of ram. I use a dedicated server for Roon with SSD drives for the Roon Library. I have started another thread about that.
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I thought what you were saying was that it’s disheartening that @Norman_Spector‘s new system, which is up to spec, performs well. So I thought I’d mention that the spec says precisely that this is what one should do for a very large library, use a high-spec system.
And Xeons are basically the precisely wrong kind of CPU for Roon, as they have many cores but average single-core performance, but that’s being discussed in the other thread.
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Sorry.. i did not mean that it was disheartening that his system works so well, but more that i have to invest in a very expensive Mac to make my library work as i want. 
I was under the impression that single core performance was more old school way of building an application as all processors today are built on some sort of hyperthreading.
Most applications today is optimized for multi-core performance and i was hoping that Roon was there as well.
My main thought was to have some sort of server solution for my Music media that i could store in the garage. But if i were to buy a brand new Mac, i would want to use it for more that only music.
Got it, but it’s still only “provide the specs that the documentation says you should”. (A MacBook was never the right tool for 700k tracks in Norman’s case, either).
It doesn’t have to be a Mac either, though new Mac Minis with Apple Silicon are nowadays probably among the best bang for the buck systems. (Whether one really needs 48 GB RAM, which is the most expensive part, is debatable, given Apple’s memory architecture. But yeah this is difficult to judge because you can’t change your mind later).
Yeah, kind of, and this aspect could be made more explicit in the docs. (Though arguably the UI always has to be on one thread, and database updates on one thread are much easier to debug - and god knows, Roon has had more than its share of database consistency trouble, nobody needs more of that). Searches are multithreaded anyway.
You can, but choose the right tool for the job - there are also Intel CPUs that prefer single-core speed over a gazillion cores. Xeons have their place, this just isn’t it (and this is also the case for many other desktop-oriented tasks. There’s a reason why Intel markets Xeons for data centers and the like)
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Yes and usually love the work capacity of the servers as i manage Datacenters and such.
The Xeon is a real Bulldozer in pushing data, but everything has to do about how the applications/Services are written. If it cannot truly benefit of many cores, there is no use running true server hardware.
Anyway, thank you so much for your answer.
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Yeah, my work machine with 128 cores and several gigs of RAM is also nice for compiling 
Are you using your new Mac as the Roon core?
Nucleus as core
Hope nobody tells my Celeron-based Asus NAS (1) it may not support 800k Tracks.
(1) Intel Celeron N5105, Roon databases an NVME, NVME cache, 32 GB memory (which should not be supported but work just well).
Data is on a single 20TB Toshiba drive which is backed up every night to another 20 TB disc. No raid on purpose. File system is btrfs to counter file corruption on bit level.
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A lot of this discussion is over my head so apologies if this is a silly question.
Your Roon Server in on a Nucleus. So your statement below means you’re using the MacBook Pro as a remote device and that has improved the performance?
I recently upgraded my MacBook Pro 2021 to the new M4 with 48GB memory – a second computer on which I control my library of nearly 700,000 tracks
Yes it has
I guess I just don’t understand how a remote device can improve Roon performance in a significant way. It doesn’t affect sound quality, right?
Performance as in interactive speed etc
Thanks. That’s what I thought. But when I try to think what an increase in interactive speed would mean for me (with a less sophisticated set up – my iMac is my core and I use a Mac laptop with modest power and my iPhone as the remotes) I’m not at all sure it would be noticeable.
Startup of Roon on my iMac takes a few seconds longer on my iMac than I’d like. If remote commands from both remote devices were executed any faster I don’t think I’d notice. And while the iPhone does occasionally lose connectivity, the laptop never does.
Well, if there’s nothing that bothers you much with regard to speed, then I guess you have no real need for an improvement. It seems to have made a difference for @Norman_Spector and his massive 700,000 tracks library.
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Yes. I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise. I can see how in a really big library that could matter.