I’ve had two Roon setups for many years: one in the city with excellent connectivity (500Mbps up and down), the other in a rural area with “evolving” ISP capabilities. Based on my own experience, I suspect it’s nearly impossible to guarantee that whatever ISP performance requirements Roon specifies would actually work dependably across the myriad endpoint and network configurations in the wild.
The gory details follow for anyone obsessive enough to slog through them
My rural ISP delivers over-the-air service from a few miles away, and performance has improved over the years from dicey 10Mb to a solid 75Mb (up and down) today. I added Starlink (and a load balancer) to the rural location a year ago, and it gets a highly-variable (time-of-day dependent) 10-200Mb down. Starlink hits 100+ms latency several times a day, and can even drop the connection for 1-2 seconds. The local ISP is pretty solid these days, but weird weather things can occasionally cause short disruptions/slowdowns with the OTA connection.
The city location has mostly been rock solid. I seldom get dropouts, I can stream Qobuz or radio via Roon all day without issue. On the rural side, I am plagued by dropouts with streaming radio and Qobuz media loading slowly. My network infrastructure is essentially the same in both locations (Unifi).
After countless experiments with various configurations I’m pretty sure my dropouts arise due to some combinatorial effect of variable internet connection coupled with diverse, grouped endpoints. For example, grouped play of Radio Paradise fails within a few minutes during peak Starlink usage (6-11pm local time) if the load balancer uses that connection, but (usually) runs fine on the local ISP during those hours. At the same time, I can run separate (un-grouped) play to the same 3 endpoints simultaneously over Starlink and get no dropouts for long periods. I get way fewer dropouts if I don’t use grouped play.
This is doubtless exacerbated by the quirkiness of my endpoints at the rural spot (wired Devialet Phantoms, wired Bluesound Pulse, wired PSAudio DIrectStream over Bridge II card). Early in my debugging saga, I just assumed that problems were due to flakey ISP service. But I’m now convinced the ISP was less relevant than the interactions among endpoints, especially when grouped. ISP issues do matter of course, but they sometimes seem to force hidden endpoint issues to arise in non-obvious ways.
Appreciate the input, but i stress that this is not about dropouts or that Roon is unavailable.
It’s about the experience which has worsened the last weeks. It’s about the Roon-blimp showing it’s ugly face on every search before the “hints” get populated, before the “New albums for you”, “Roon playlists”, before showing (and still reloading the whole content) the “Discovery” page.
If this is a change in my local network, fine, then tell me so. But everyother streaming service and local area playback works instantly and with no disturbances. And since Roon still won’t introduce a diagnostic tool which would paint the picture clear as mud, i blame Roons changes.
And, yes, i can use Roon to upsample two simultaneous streams to DSD512 using minimal phase, smooth and 7th order (CLANS) without dropouts to two of my endpoints. A delay before start, yes, but that is expected. It’s the user experience in the Roon Interface that has become sluggish (and epileptic seizure inducing while scrolling albums AGAIN)…
Basically this has made me revert to LMS/iPeng and Auralic Lightning DS for most of my playback. And wadda you know? I don’t have to search for everything, i can BROWSE my storage with immediate response on every occasion.
Edit: It obviously helps to nag, because this morning the experience is a bit better?
And to paint a clearer picture, when in Album view, the response is instant while filtering or scrolling (still a horrible visual experience due to stuttering though). Same in tracks view also.
My laymans explanation is that local server capabilities are very well met, but the cloud perfomance lacks…
You are right search is limping along , either by “magnifying glass” or “Filter”
I have a BIG set (Mozart 225) of 200 CD’s, if I try to type “oboe” it limp along letter by letter, eventually Roon goes “not responding” something I have never seen before
I suspect the actual bandwidth speed is not the issue as we are seeing posters with 20 mbs (me) and 100 + Mbs seeing the same behaviour. It does seem to point to search performance on the cloud servers. The data up and data down requirements are relatively small comapared with the number crunching of the actual search.
I for one can’t live with it like this. Tidal shows my 200 CD set as a collection of smaller sets , I have just split my set as a test into these smaller units to see if that makes any difference. It’s still importing and analyzing (>4000 tracks)
@Tony_Casey has been commenting for a while about big boxes having a negative impact on search performance.
I am not worries about “internet always on” per se but to have that limitation must be paying back benefits which currently it doesn’t seem to be the case.
As my Annual sub renews in Late December I really was considering life time , I am currently hesitant.
I have had to remove my local copy and rely now on a number of smaller Qobuz sub-sets . A search on “oboe” now works normally but that is in each one of +/-20 sub-sets. I do not know how to search across all +/- 20 sub-sets. It is far from 100% accurate and not ideal because I cannot set genres at a work level, only at an album level, but I also have several instrumentation genres such as Classical/Piano, Classical/Violin, Classical/Oboe . . . etc. But of course it is not possible to search via genre in roon at the moment!
I hope roon get on top of these server issues soon! It is also now effecting gapless. Several threads have popped up. Gapless qobuz has gone for me and I don’t believe it is network issues either.
This is quite on point. Now that Roon requires Internet for everything the round trip time to the instance of the Roon elements in the cloud including the processing time at that point is quite relevant to end user apparent performance. Factors will most likely be where you are situated vs the Roon instance as well as whether Roon adequately resources those instances for whatever it’s doing. They used to get much of the processing for “free”, actually you paid for it by running hardware, now they are paying for it in the cloud or more accurately, you are via increased subs.
I can no longer remember which ones I split into CD’s, which ones I split into sections and which ones I left as is. I don’t know if there is an easy way of finding out. @zenit specifically mentioned only the Mozart 225 as causing the roon servers problems but he did say there were others. Maybe he can open up logging on your core and tell you which boxes you should split?
I think several large boxes benefit from splitting into sections regardless of roon performance and can be identified that way. A lot easier to navigate. It is not very systematic but if you have the Furtwangler Legacy, that splits nicely into chunks. Other ones are the DG Beethoven Complete, the DG Brahms Complete and the Hänssler Bach Complete. I have a very long way to go with the Hyperion Liszt (Howard) but so far it splits nicely.
The Howard Liszt is easy , they are all individual Cd Or 2- 3 sets. As is Hanssler Bach
Bulk reset the CD# to 1 and reimport , obviously the bigger sets get the right no. There aren’t many
Beethoven and Brahms are already split into small sub sets Brahms is on 57 anyway
My gut feeling is <50 isn’t a problem , I have yet to test that feeling
EDIT : Make that 10 or less , 10 is uncomfortably slow
Mozart 225 is the single biggest box I know of , most boxes that big are logically split like Karajan into years or Beethoven into sub genres. I need to think now what is my biggest remaining box
The big issue on say 225 is how you get all the instances of a composition that may be in 2 or more sub sets with Period / Legendary and Normal. same for Beethoven 250 and Bach 333 where the sub sets are not genre specific . I guess the Composition View then filter by 225
I also operate roon from a rural site with 20/4 and 20ms and there is no prospect of improving these numbers.
Roon works fine now that I have a roon-specified ROCK running the show - previously running from a slower machine I had endless problems with roon hanging. It would be nice to have a roon option to “run 100% locally without internet connection” at times when the net connection is unavailable. Surely most of us can live without search and only use our local library for extended periods.
I note that streaming netflix works fine too despite the low BW.
No, not particularly. I would like a statement from Roon what they deem sufficient for a proper Roon experience.
Let’s reiterate; I’m am NOT experiencing dropouts, delays or any other disturbance. My network is fine, thank you!
I am, however, having a worse experience when utilizing the Roon GUI, and in generl the parts of it that are related to cloud based functions, such as “New Albums for you”, Search “hints” and other similar functions.
Point is, when you make achitectural decisions. such as relocation parts of the business logic to the cloud, the factors of this integration matters.
So, damnit, what are the requirements?
It’s a bit of a weird question. I am not Roon but I can tell you with certainty that your “100Mbps/100Mbps fibre optic WAN access, with general response times less than 10ms” is easily better than the requirements.
There you go, you have a reference figure obviously? Please tell…
Is a shaky 3G cellular okay for being able to find my albums in my local library? (Which in itself is a red herring) Whats the requirement for Search to be able to populate the “hints” before i am able to write “led zeppelin” and press enter? I can tell you that i am typing faster than my “Roon” is thinking right now…
What is the expected latency before “Recommended albums for you” is populated and i am able to scroll downwards on the Home screen?
If you percieve these questions as weird, you’re likely not in the IT business, dealing with pro’s and con’s of cloud based computing. I am…
Your not alone Mikael it’s very much slower and the quick jump is no longer quick in any shape or form. It also doesn’t even show up now until you stop typing where before it would start to populate and change as you added more characters.
I don’t believe our bandwidth has anything to do with it, it’s their infrastructure and code that’s the issue in my opinion it’s the only thing that changed.
As mentioned, I have 300/30 with usually ~17 ms and not seeing any responsiveness problems, so if you do it’s most likely not caused by your much better nominal values.
From Roon’s perspective it probably doesn’t make much sense to go into the small details of this in official statements. They have to make sure that it works with the connection speeds of regular home accounts, or the problems would be endless
I am in the IT business, thanks. Not so much with cloud though. The questions your asked now in the post where this quote comes from are not weird but very reasonable. But as others with slower internet have no problems they are not caused by the nominal speeds, so what I found a bit weird was insisting on an official statement about required speeds
It makes sense , for the algorithm in question to only run on heavy duty hardware in the cloud means that it must be quite processor heavy or we could run it each on our own cores.
The data up and down hopefully is trivial and the time taken is in processingthe request and not transferring the request and result
I suppose we will never know …
For reference my internet connection gives me no problems, latency or stuttering and you can see is quite modest compared to some quoted above
You are reading me correct, i’m not specifically interested in what speed is required, as i suppose you and i are sufficiently equipped on that front.
The core of the question is, how can Roon (and it’s customer base) maintain a quick, smooth and pleasant experience while migrating parts of the business logic to the cloud.
One of the architectural demands to enable this move, is a definition of required connectivity.
I am sure, the Roon guys are well aware of these limitations though, and i don’t think it would be detrimental to their business to elaborate.
I don’t, either, I just think it wouldn’t help them much. It has to just work with whatever reasonable ISP contracts the users have, or the endless ARC threads will be comparatively a walk in the park
