After running the Roon client for about 15 minutes, the memory usage on my Mac Mini M1 has reached 1.21GB. No other application uses that much memory.
The same goes for the iPhone and iPad app.
Roon uses the Mono framework to write an application for all systems. But Mono is a space and memory hog.
The reason for doing so is that writing an application/app specific for each environment costs more than using one code base. If Roon were freeware or inexpensive I could understand.
Maybe it is an idea to rewrite the Roon client and use web technology: html, css and javascript. That would be even more cost effective.
Roon is based on Microsoft’s .net infrastructure so this had to be emulated using Mono on Linux and Mac as Microsoft didn’t support those platforms. . Microsoft have now official support for both now
Linux switched last year as it had been out for a while and has been a big improvement on the memory issue I believe. They are working on switching Mac over to, but it’s only just come out so will be a while yet as the code stables and is more mature on the platform.
You paid for all that RAM. Get your monies worth!!
While Roon does use a lot of memory I find it plays nice with whatever memory it can get access to. Is there an issue here or are you just concerned about how much memory it has grabbed?
I see a trend of more and more applications using generic frameworks. This not only means that as a user I have to buy more and more memory, but also that these kinds of applications do not meet the user interface that is expected on a given platform (for Apple see here). An example from the past is Java. Currently we have the Electron moloch. In the end, these applications needlessly degrade the performance of a computer.
I would expect Roon to pay more attention to this.
Not for the m1 it hasn’t. Which has only just been released. They are working on switching Mac over to it like they did with linux so it’s all running on .net and not mono which appears to be the memory hog.
It’s been cross-platform for servers for a long time, but they just released support for making Mac, iOS, and Android apps in November 2021 with the .NET 6.0 release. We are in the process of migrating to it.
The problem isn’t with memory, it’s with the M1 architecture. Memory is cheap, Apple’s memory limitation on M1 and the additional stupidity of not being able to upgrade the 8GB units to 16GB yourself is the real problem.
In any case is this actually causing an issue or do you just object to the software using the memory out of principle?
@Ralf_Ortmanns The real problem is that Roon is an application that’s in use all the time. The memory pressure is always there. Slowly Roon increases its memory usage. After some hours this is the picture:
As I have stated before: maybe the Roon client should be rewritten as a web application. Also multi-platform and less memory hungry (I have never seen a web application that uses this much memory).
I’m still not getting what the actual problem is, you haven’t provided one except to say it uses a lot of memory. Is this impacting on other work? Do you hold conscientious objector views on apps using a lot of memory? If it impact your work just bounce the service but I suspect it really isn’t a problem.
As for web apps, they’re for the web with with internet based data. I’ve never seen an app written in Java, CSS etc for the desktop that isn’t a pile of junk. Java is barely suitable for web apps as far as I’m concerned. Java is a security nightmare.
I have Roon installed on QNAP with 15 Gb Ram. Roon uses up to 12 Gb, endresult is that my system is very slow in response.
My collection is very large, about 960000 songs. Plex is not using much at all, about 2 gb max.
If your Core is running on QNAP, with that large a library, then it’s not surprising that you have that much memory assigned to Roon - the database is held in memory, and with that size of library, it will need a lot of RAM!
I have a very large collection and run my core on a proxmox server. I have rebuilt the system several times with different flavors of Ubuntu and allocate different amounts of memory and allocated a different number of processor cores with each rebuild as a test. The VM is always dedicated to Roon and no other unnecessary software is installed. I find no matter how much ram I allocate to the system roon uses up about 85% of the memory. I can allocate 2G or 24G, roon core uses it all up. Right now I have 12G allocated and 10.16 G is being used and the system was rebooted 5 hours ago. I don’t notice any difference in system performance no matter how much ram is allocated. It boots up using a small amount with but within a few hours it gobbles up 85% and slowly starts increasing from there. It kind of freeks me out to know this and so the system is set to reboot every night but this is probably unnecessary. In the end it always works fine. It is a mystery.
I’ll second this experience. I see the same thing with ROCK running in a VM on top of Proxmox. Roon will use whatever RAM it can find. There is absolutely no issue with this. Memory usage alone is not an indication of a problem. Thanks @Greg_Norman, glad we are sharing the same experience.
