Roon & ARC have become incredibly unreliable for me - what is going on?

[GalaxyGlider]

Hi @connor,

thanks for the reply. I will try to reply to each of your points separately:

@connor

1. There appears to be a large volume of tracks queuing to at least one Zone, sometimes in the realm of 800 tracks. The team has an open ticket to investigate hanging behavior when attempting to initiate playback from an Album Details page (Play Now + button) when several hundred streaming-service tracks are queued. Do you encounter any hanging when either playing to a large queue or adding additional tracks to the queue?

The issue I described in this thread happens with smaller queues as well. It can be an album-sized queue of 10 tracks or several hundred tracks when I shuffle a playlist. The size of the queue to me does not seem to make a concernable difference.

@connor

2. Multicast is failing on your network. Multizone playback in particular relies on stable multicast, without network filtering or too much packet loss. We need to review the hardware involved in your network, and we need to confirm how you’re using the VPN you appear to have configured for remote access to your ROCK.

This must be a separate issue unless it affects ARC as well. I use Sonos streaming from Roon to a pair of Play:5s. The connection seems very stable without any hiccups.

Regarding VPN: I do not have a VPN configured to access my Rock specifically. I have set-up a VPN on my Asus Router for remote access into my home network. Rock happens to be accessible that way also but that was not my primary concern to set-up my personal VPN.

@connor

3. UPnP is not properly routing discovery traffic between your ROCK and Sonos endpoints. Specifically, the subscription request time is too short, and Roon can’t retain sight of the Sonos IP address. You’ll need to enter your router web GUI and try to change the UPnP device subscription time (it’s likely at thirty minutes or less).

If the UPnP stack is outdated on your router, this will also interfere with ARC unless you’ve manually configured port forwarding or rely on IPv6. I recommend you double-check that you have up-to-date router firmware and that any VPNs or firewalls on this network aren’t interfering with UPnP.

I have disabled UPnP on my router and handle all port-forwarding manually. But I do not know how the traffic between my local devices is handled. I can check whether Asus allows for such a setting change. I can confirm that the router is on the latest firmware also.

@connor

4. There are web exceptions in logs referring to a forced handshake closure on the part of your Remote clients. Your Roon Remotes are not accepting certain requests from your ROCK. They might be blocked by a) physical interference in the WiFi b) security firmware, c) VPNs on the Remotes. It’s worth removing variables one by one.

Put simply, there appear to be two issues underpinning the symptoms you’ve experienced. The first is an unstable connection between your ROCK and your Roon Remotes and endpoints, possibly as a result of network security or hardware configuration. The second issue is an upstream connection failure to Roon ARC, possibly with the same cause.

Additionally, are you able to reproduce any playback failures or poor connection popups if you queue one track at a time to the System Output of a Remote?

I can check for logs in my router but generally I would describe my network as very stable. As I said the issue only appears when using ARC, remotely or with a direct connection on my local network. My Roon endpoint on my Mac, Naim streamer, iPad and iPhone all work without any hiccups for hours on end as well as streaming to my Sonos endpoint. Only the ARC connection after the second-to-last update clogs up the core rendering all endpoints unable to connect to the core anymore without a restart.

@connor

The more specific details you can provide about your network and how you’ve configured it, the more positioned the support team will be to assist you.

There’s not much more information I can provide. It is a fairly simple setup. Rock connect by LAN with Asus router. All endpoints are using WiFi in viewing distance of the router. Rock is accessible by ARC through manual port-forwarding. Roon streaming on local network works without any problems. ARC remotely or on local-LAN causes the issues.

As others have experienced similar issues since the later updates I doubt it is an issue exclusive to my network configuration.