I had been running the roon server core on my PC, it was a desktop that had nearly TOTL specs across the board as it was built for current generation VR headset.
To my surprise running roon core on a server made the browsing interface so much faster and snappy and my server has worse specs than the PC processing wise. How is this possible?
I do not understand how the Core can be so choppy on even such a well specced computer, how do most people deal with roon browsing when it is always semi choppy/laggy when using a PC?
What are your experiences with running roon core off your computer?
Update: I am an idiot, reason was because my PC was wireless and now my server is wired. I suspect the differences not to be much if my PC was also wired.
I had lots of problems running Roon core on a very high powered Dell XPS 15 laptop. Problems went to zero when I moved to a Roon Nucleus. You really need a dedicated machine for Roon core, IMHO.
Well, I suspect most people don’t have the issue. For example, I’ve NEVER had Roon be semi choppy/laggy on a PC. And I’ve run it on at least 12 of them over the last 5 years. All i7 or better gaming rigs.
So, I suspect that some other software that is running on that computer is interacting with Roon. There can be any number of other software, including but not limited to VPNs, Anti-Virus, Firewalls, Backups, Realtek Audio Drivers, that can cause similar symptoms.
But, certainly running Roon on a dedicated machine without other software will always make things work more smoothly.
You really need a dedicated PC/laptop to run Roon if you have a large music library - I use a Pentium I5 PC with an SSD and with my music library on an external HDD directly connected to the PC. Before then, I used to use my laptop with the music library stored on a NAS - and was constantly having problems.
Server architectures are optimized differently than desktops/laptops. When it comes to indexing and moving a lot of data around, a Server will typically outperform a desktop. Roon is not all that demanding, so you don’t really need a lot of power for a well performing core. I have two 12-core Xeon processors with 128GB ECC RAM and large L1 and L2 caches. Roon barely makes a noticeable dent in the available overhead. I’m running Win10 Workstation Pro for use as a DAW which is why the system is configured the way it is.