I have noticed that my software firewall can cause dropouts when I’m using Roon and upsampling in HQPlayer. I don’t really want to turn off the firewall permanently, so I’m curious what others have done to minimize the effects of firewalls on the Roon/HQPlayer reaction. Specifically, I can see that when on the firewall process consumes significantly more CPU, memory and network resources the minute both Roon and HQPlayer are on. Adding Tidal to the mix makes it even worse and I get far more dropouts playing Tidal than playing 16/44 content off my NAS.
Jussi: Yes, Windows 10 Professional 64bit and Bitdefender Internet Security 2016 (I switched to Bitdefender because it had less impact on system resources). I noticed that the process “system and compressed memory” was soaking up huge amounts of both memory and network resources. At first I thought it was the firewall trying to examine incoming bits from Tidal. But reading a bit more on the process indicates that it is used for pre-fetch and post-fetch of data to speed up web pages in Chrome and other browsers. I don’t have any other software running when I use HQPlayer and Roon, so I wondered whether maybe one of those is using the pre-fetch to pull music files from the NAS? I didn’t want to disable it if is actually being used by Roon or HQPlayer (or perhaps Tidal), but it does seem to be hogging enough resources to cause dropouts (and for some reason they are much worse with Tidal than with regular 16/44 files from the NAS.