Hi @Norman_Spector,
We’re very grateful for your patience during our lengthy investigation into performance issues with ARC and your Roon database. At long last, we’ve come to some conclusions and can hopefully provide a brighter path forward:
Firstly, and for context, I want to pass along some thoughts about RoonServer performance issues you’ve been encountering:
Unfortunately, my teammate Zenit’s suspicion that your subdirectories were the underlying issue is very likely correct. Here’s his response to your thread in 2022, along with some elaborative notes below:
- This Roon database does indeed have a sufficiently novel subdirectory structure to tax Roon’s ability to index the library. From a user perspective, this manifests in Roon Remote as slowness, possible hanging, and poor performance across the app that increases in severity between restarts or whenever you make changes that affect a significant number of objects in the database.
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Additionally, Roon’s background analysis is rechurning on the roughly 10-15% of the library that unidentified content - a total of about 80,000 unidentified waveforms to scan. This is unlikely the be the root cause of any performance issues, but it will certainly take up a baseline level of processing power when Roon is online.
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The good news is that we’ve made some changes to Roon Remote ↔ RoonServer connection stability that should help with performance issues overall. We’re hoping that regular Roon has functioned better recently for you outside of ARC. Additionally, we’re not giving up on our users with more customized and expansive music collections. You can expect us to continue to dedicate resources to RoonServer performance problems.
However, Roon is not designed as file management software; your subdirectory structure has to provide a scaffold, so to speak, for indexing to work properly. The schema generally resembles Directory Folder → Artist Folder → Album Folder → Track Files, but it’s highly flexible with other schema as long as they roughly match the ratios of folder-to-file therein.
Specifically, make sure that you’re avoiding the habit of dumping thousands or hundreds of tracks from a wide array of albums and artists into the same subfolders in your local storage folders. Looking at the breakdown of your library above, you seem to have a much larger volume of both albums and tracks by some artists than Roon’s analysis expects. It might be worth breaking these up into multiple Artist-level folders so neither folder has a wonky Folder : Object ratio.
Roon’s indexing is flexible, but designed to function within the time-tested music industry file storage directory schema of Artist → Album → Track. It’s best to make sure your subdirectories mirror this taxonomy where possible.
I know we’re reiterating these local storage recommendations with a heavy-hand. The reason is that, at your library size, database performance issues are sure to also affect ARC. Regardless of whether you are or are not physically downloading tracks from your library to your phone in ARC, the app relies on RoonServer for library management. If it’s syncing with a troubled database, it’s not going to perform well.
That doesn’t mean you’re not also seeing a real problem in ARC, however, and database subdirectory problems aside, this iPhone should be able to launch the app.
- The report from two days ago is indeed abnormal behavior on the iPhone 15 when we investigated diagnostic logging around that time. Are you able to provide a screenshot of what you’re seeing in ARC when you attempt to connect on your local WiFi network?
As an initial workaround, if you haven’t already, try the usual due diligence first. Uninstall and reinstall ARC fully on the phone and attempt to log back in.
- This bug is different than what you were experiencing previously - the sync doesn’t appear to failing via the same mechanism. While we’re loathe to leave this inconclusive, due diligence requires me to kindly request that you reproduce the issue once more and, should your patience allow, upload one more copy of your Roon database now that you’ve updated to the most recent version of Roon and Roon ARC.
This should provide illumination as to why an otherwise supported setup on an iPhone isn’t working with ARC. I doubt it’s your router or ISP, as we’ve troubleshot that previously. There’s likely something we can pinpoint once we know more.
We appreciate your patience and we’re happy to answer any questions in the meantime.
