Roon and MacOS CPU resources - revisited

I just recently picked up a new MacBook Pro and installed the Roon software upon it to run as a remote control. My music is being served on an older iMac.

The battery widget reported that Roon was using “significant energy.” I really don’t know what it’s doing, especially when the only activity in the window is the moving bar at the bottom as the track plays. Minimizing the window into the Dock changed the overall CPU percentage to just 5%. Note that this top readout, attached, was not when there was any interaction with the app.

Have you looked into making the app run more efficiently on mobile platforms?

Just curious, what Mac model are you using and do you have Roon Remote in a large window/fullscreen, what screen resolution?

On a dirty cheap M1 with Rosetta, I can’t get more than 8-9% on 1.8 build 931
I agree that’s probably too much that’s why I don’t hesitate to quit the app once I am done with a few hours of tracks in the queue.

My Roon server computer is an iMac 5K with a 4Ghz quad core i7, 16GB RAM. I’m only using it to host Roon right now. I did see that when Spotlight would run things would skip/stop playback on Roon. I disabled Spotlight completely. On good days Roon on that computer will run between 8-18%.

Until sometimes it doesn’t.

My remote computer where I noticed the 100+% CPU usage is a brand new M1 Max, 32GB PowerBook Pro. Right now, just sitting here, it’s consuming 26% CPU time on the MacBook.

The server is running through a scan (just restarted it with a software update) and it’s going at 132%.

I’ve got 6000 albums with a mix from Qobuz and locally stored via NAS.

As a comparison, I ran Audirvana Studio. It consumes 9% when it’s playing back and search is near instantaneous. I do prefer the support for convolution filtering and Sonos playback on Roon.

I neglected to answer your question fully. When I noticed the 100% CPU on the MacBook, it was full screen in it’s own desktop.

I run it as a remote on my MBP 2021 M1 and it doesn’t drop a beat or use too much of anything.

Do you know since which build?

Since build 903 there are some people suffering from high CPU load with the Windows version running on Linux. We attributed it to some issue with the Wine compatibility layer that’s enabling the Windows version on Linux. However, not everyone seems to be affected, and I’m wondering if it’s something else that might, in certain scenarios, affect other, fully supported platforms as well.

As of today, build 931 on both remote and core. With both copies running and no music playing, they’re both hovering around 2-3% which I would consider behaving well. I will continue to monitor but these issues aren’t always consistent.

Playing via the remote, jumps up to 3-6%. Core 25-36%. Will let it go for awhile today and see if it acts up again.

Oh well, this is different then. The other issue with Wine/Linux has Roon using 80% of one CPU core permanently, even when idle