I’ve been using Roon for close to nine years now, across five different (and frankly over-specced) Core machines, three completely separate home networks, and a wide variety of endpoints. Despite all those changes, one issue has remained consistent: over time, Roon begins to lag, sometimes quite badly.
Whenever I’ve brought this up on the forum, the first replies often sound like, “It works fine for me, so it must be something on your end.” I understand the intention might be to help, but responses like that aren’t particularly useful and often add to the frustration. In fact, this persistent issue has become one of the main reasons I no longer recommend Roon to others, despite its strengths.
To keep things usable, I’ve even set Roon Server to reboot itself every day. It starts out fast and responsive, but after several hours of normal use, performance begins to degrade, until I’m waiting 20 to 30 seconds for a track to start. Restarting Roon helps, but that’s not a sustainable solution.
A particularly frustrating aspect is when Roon initiates background tasks like a library rescan or metadata update. During those times, the entire system slows to a crawl, and it can become nearly impossible to play music at all, sometimes for hours.
From a technical perspective, this seems to come down to how Roon handles process prioritization internally. It doesn’t seem to assign elevated priority to time-sensitive or user-facing tasks like audio playback or UI responsiveness. In fact, user input appears to have little or no priority over background operations, which is quite unusual—most modern software is designed to ensure that user interaction remains responsive, even when background tasks are running. Roon seems to do the opposite.
This isn’t a network or hardware problem, I’ve tested enough environments over the years to rule that out. It seems to be a structural issue in how Roon manages its internal workload and thread priorities. Without addressing this, no amount of hardware will make a difference in the long term. The problem always returns.
What’s especially frustrating is that Roon is both the slowest music player I’ve used, and also the most expensive. I’ve even had moments where people laugh when I demo it, because of how sluggish it feels. And it’s not just me: I’ve seen the same lag in high-end audio shops, at audio shows, and in other people’s homes. It’s real, and it’s widespread. I care because I love what Roon is trying to do, but the performance issues have become hard to ignore.
In short: it’s slow or it becomes slow over time. And I really hope this is something the team starts to take seriously. Up until then I advice anyone who asks to look elsewhere and avoid the constant hassle
