Is there a chance that Roon will take up less memory than it does now in a future update? Or is this an insurmountable limitation?
I ask because my core is a 16GB Mac Mini M2 Pro. When I bought it 2 years ago, I never thought I would run out of memory for use, but now with 63K albums and 84% of memory occupied, I’m starting to worry.
I can’t speak with any authority with regards to Roon, but in general, software systems tend to require more RAM over time. Not less. Especially as new features are added.
MacOS does swap and the SSD is reasonably fast, so it’s not as if it will crash or grind to a halt if you hit 100
Hopefully, for now, even with 85% occupied, I don’t notice any crashes or slowdowns.
@Wade_Oram My hope is that Roon follows the path of HQplayer which with each update (version 5) is using less processing for identical configurations, in the beginning it demanded about 60% of the CPU for the configurations I use, today less than 30%.
Generally, in most cases more features mean more memory. There is also a quite typical trade-off between speed and memory usage in much of computer science, insofar as faster algorithms and data structures use more memory (not always but as a tendency).
There’s also still 3GB available, so there is some room.
Finally, 13 GB for 60k tracks is on the high side. Roon Server itself, at least on Roon OS, should fit into less than 4GB.
Therefore, I wonder how the memory usage is distributed in your Mac’s Activity Monitor. Usually, much of the available RAM is used for file caching, because it’s better to use it for this than leaving it unused. But this reduces itself automatically without any ill effects as RAM gets tighter.
I see, so not actually much usage for caching.
The usage of RoonAppliance process seems unusually high. (Remember, the Nucleus has 4GB and is expected to be sufficient for 100k tracks, but your RoonAppliance alone uses 14).
I’d suggest that you open a new topic via Support > Get Help to have official support investigate this.
Not unusually high pretty normal for a lot of users not on Rock. As I mentioned in the other thread. My library was half of this size yet occupied 5-6gb of ram on Linux when used a lot and this would creep up the more during search, add new music, metadata updates and particular when editing metadata via Roon. It only seems to go down when you reboot. This sort of memory hogging been reported lots by users and it just never gets addressed.
But @luiz_antonio_budel_j has a library of 63k albums which must be well in excess of 500k tracks. A huge library.
I read it as tracks lol. Yeah that’s a lot of albums and will consume loads of ram regardless of os.
Yes, there are 635,000 tracks.
Yes, I know, when I bought this MMM2 I had about 20k albums and I never imagined that I would expand the library so much, but today I am in France expanding and I should reach 80k by the end of the year. Let’s see how the machine behaves, in fact the memory usage remains stable compared to when I had 50k albums.
I think you can only wait and see and hope for the best, and buy a new machine when you need to. (Or maybe you don‘t really need 6 years of 365/24 music 
)
However, probably you shouldn’t expect Roon memory usage to go down on average (except maybe, if we are lucky, the seemingly pathological peaks that @CrystalGipsy described)
I run my core on a M2 Mac Mini as well, with 8gb of RAM, and it seems to always be at that level of RAM utilization as well. As of this post my Mini has 6.31gb used on the Mac Activity Monitor app (viewable in settings). There are some cached files, but am not concerned because there are zero bytes being used on swap.
The experience is similar with my Linux servers, RAM utilization just tends to work that way at “first glance”.
If I went to a 16gb or 32gb RAM Mac Mini, the RAM utilization would appear the same. I just haven’t done so because Roon currently averages around 32-38% CPU utilization with my particular settings with no swap utilization at all. If it started averaging something above 50% CPU utilization, then I might consider options, especially if swap appeared to be an ongoing occurrence.
If your experience is similar, then I wouldn’t be concerned.
Hope this helps,
In my case it was a little different, when I had 30k albums the memory occupation was smaller, I don’t remember if it was between 60 or 70%, that is, it was still not proportional to the amount of files on the Roon server, since I doubled the library and the memory occupied was about 20% higher, Roon uses very little processing in my case, less than 10% of the CPU usage, I use HQplayer associated with Roon and this demands more processing with upsampler to DSD 256, but it has been decreasing as new versions of HQP are released, with the same settings.
CPU processing time is not the same as memory use///
