Roon ARC slows down and crashes with large library additions (ref#E3V75D)

What’s happening?

· I'm having trouble with Roon ARC

What best describes your issue with ARC

· Other

How can we help?

· I am experiencing freezes or crashes

Other options

· Other

Describe the issue

Roon Arc becomes slow and crashes after a few days or weeks (and the phone gets very hot during this process), so you need to reinstall and resync. When it's working fine, everything works pretty well despite the large library. When you add dozens or hundreds of disks, it starts to have problems, and as I mentioned above, you need to reinstall and resync, then it starts to work fine again for a while.

Describe your network setup

Iphone 13, Roon Rock in NUC, 700k tracks, Sunrise Router

Hi @guimx,

Thank you for the report. Diagnostics indicate that the ARC instance associated with your account is receiving extreme memory pressure warnings from the phone’s operating system. iOS very likely can’t run ARC with this large of a database.

In order for ARC to successfully play library content with poor or limited connectivity, Roon needs to synchronize information about your music library onto your mobile device. This database sync is a separate process from downloading tracks for offline playback - ARC needs to retain a list of all “objects” in your library to prevent database corruption and maintain parity with your Roon database. While the data synchronized is much more compact than what is stored in the RoonServer, 700,000 tracks is very likely still too big for a mobile device. Aside from limitations in device performance, there are also restrictions on resource usage imposed by Apple and Google which make this scale of data transfer, synchronization, and storage impractical within a mobile app.

The current estimation for maximum compatible library size varies widely by the makeup of your library (file format, etc). The team estimates the upper range to be between 100k-200k tracks, depending on the processing power of the phone.

If offline mobile playback with ARC is a priority, we generally recommend 1) creating a Backup of your current database for due diligence and 2) creating a fresh Roon database with only a portion of your library imported via Watched Folders (start at 100k tracks). This will lower the object count sufficiently for ARC to sync and then maintain the database without resource constraints and memory pressure.

Hopefully, this is helpful. Thank you!

1 Like

Ok, thanks for the clear explanations, one more question. When we talk about insufficient smartphone memory, do we mean RAM? Can we estimate how much memory would be needed for the entire library? The current iPhone 13 device has 4GB of memory. Thanks.

Hi @guimx,

Yes we’re talking about RAM here. The standard for large libraries (i.e. around 100,000 tracks) on servers is 16 GB. That could be the case here but I also want to point out what my colleague @connor said about limitations imposed by the OS

With that I don’t know that getting a phone with higher RAM will actually make this workable.

OK, thanks. I don’t know anything about Apple/Google restrictions, but I’d venture to think 5G technology is useful. However, I should point out that the phone works fine for a while. Let’s say that even with 700,000 tracks, it runs fine and smooth unless I load dozens or hundreds of other records. This, in my opinion, means the system could work fine with a little more power. Furthermore, when it stops working and becomes slow or freezes, it’s the phone that gets hot, and again, in my opinion, it means, in addition to what you said (which is certainly correct), that the phone’s hardware is the bottleneck. When I replace the phone, we’ll see the results.

Hello @guimx,

Thank you for the update.

Please let us know how things go with the phone that has better hardware specifications. If you continue to experience issues, I recommend leaving your feedback in the Feedback > Feature Suggestions section of the forum. This will help bring visibility to the product team and allow other community members to vote on the suggestion, helping prioritize it on the product roadmap.

We’ll go ahead and close this thread for now, but feel free to open a new one if the issue persists or if you need further assistance in the future.

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