I just wonder if the current version is overdoing the communication to home base, 12 hours without music :
Domain Hits
imagecache.roonlabs.net 18736
push.roonlabs.com 944
metadata.roonlabs.net 722
metadataserver.roonlabs.net 397
If this also happens during playback, perhaps this is one of the reasons that I get dropouts from time to time.
One of the reasons using a fast DNS server helps is that it does a LOT of pings.
And a reason why Roon recommends the core runs 24/7 with no energy saving sleep breaks.
I suppose it depends on the speed and the quality of your internet connection, but here’s a data point for you. Today, whilst we were listening to albums being streamed from Qobuz, Roon decided to phone home for metadata updates. We didn’t hear any dropouts or change in the audio quality. In fact I didn’t even realise that it had happened until I looked at the pi-hole logs after being prompted by your post…
even running ROCK, you can examine the log files to figure out why the traffic. I notice occasionally the traffic between my NUC and the Roon Labs cloud is due to images getting automatically updated (probably due to a batch AI job to “fix” some of the artist portraits. Some of them (unaltered) are laughably bad. A female artist I follow had a artist photo that only showed her chest, stopped at her neck. Imagine showing this to adult friends during a party. They’d probably think I was a sexist prat.
My point is that if you compare the heavy traffic whit the fragile network transport protocol in Roon, and at the same time look at all the forum issues users have whit drop out, there could be an easy fix to this, reduce the communication.
And for @ged_hickman1Ged I have a robust symmetric connection 256/256mb and a DNS ping 5ms, so this is not the problem.
Save energy, turn off Ronn Hardware when not in use
I wasn’t commenting on the dropouts just the traffic 
However, dropouts tend to be due to the local network rather than the WAN. Obviously yours may well not be but overall in the responses to dropouts the fixes tend to be local .
Pardon? It seems to me the issue is not Roon’s network transport protocol, but the fragility of the local network itself in many cases.
The RAAT protocol does require a robust LAN, and if the network isn’t up to snuff, then the best course of action is to improve the network. The added overhead of Roon doing metadata updates via the internet at the same time as using RAAT to deliver audio to endpoints over the LAN is vanishingly small, I would suggest.
For some users it maybe true that they have problems whit there network, in my case it not. But it still answers the main questions, why there is this heavy traffic over 12 hours whit no music playing.
But for the benefit of others users I will post what services than can be blocked whiteout loosing functionality,
Nobody in here has posted any real traffic figures so far. You were talking about domain hits, others about DNS queries. One doesn’t need much of either to start a several gigabyte download that might last for hours.
