I have an i3-based 16GB Ram NUC running Roon Rock - it does nothing else other than act as a Roon server.
Roon is often (but not always) painfully slow in everything it does from search to loading an artist to loading an artist discography to loading an album through to playing a track.
I have 5000 albums and 90000 tracks in my library, split evenly between ripped files and Qobuz.
The ripped files are in two locations: one on the internal 2TB storage of the NUC and the other as a 2TB USB plug-in hard drive, plugged into the NUC.
I don’t want to upgrade to an i7 processor-based NUC if it won’t solve this problem as it is expensive.
Would anyone know if it would help? Or if not is there another solution? I find that if I turn off my router and unmanaged switch and the NUC and then turm them all on again, it speeds up for a while. But then slows down again.
Hi Duckworp,
an i3-based nuic is not the fastest device on the planet but overall sufficient for a typical roon server. 16GB ram also sounds good. It would be interesting what internal drive you are using. is it an NVME and what is the reading speed.
Especially critical is the USB drive. If you do not have a decent USB3.0 or 3.1 interface in combination with a good external hard drive enclosure this can have an impact. I do not know on which drive the roon databse is located this needs definitely a fast access storage location.
All I can say that I would first try to improve data access to the roon database and the sotred music before I’d consider to upgrade the cpu
Thanks for your reply. I will try removing the external USB drive and see if that solves the problem. The NUC came with an internal hard drive and I added a second drive for music storage (2TB). The Roon database is located in the NUC internal drive.
Hi Duckworp you could have a look at the NUC BIOS settings, as I recently discovered mine were not optimised for running Roon. Changing the BIOS to performance settings has made a big difference in search for me as that is almost certainly CPU bound since v2 of Roon.
Attach a keyboard and press F2 at boot time when you see the NUC logo on the screen .
Check the FAN settings as mine was set to fanless (which it is) and that significantly limited it’s available power, when I changed it back to performance fan it is running at least 2-3 times as fast doing searches etc.
It is also running just as cool as before, but you could try some different options and see what it looks like for you
Could you specify the generation and particular CPU you are running roon on please? It makes a huge difference if it is a later gen i3 with high frequency or a rather outdated one. A 14th gen quadcore i3 can be faster than outdated i7s for example.
A 90k library is according to my experience the tipping point for many systems with underpowered or outdated CPU, and not without good reason 100k is said to be the limit for a Roon Nucleus running a 7th Gen NUC and a i3-7100U.
I have a 2019 roon nucleus. I do not know what type of hardware is inside.
This is also becoming painfully slow since a few months.
I have started to automatically restart roon every night but this does not help.
Loading the play queue overview, loading a discography, loading the overview page, it is all taking a painful 10 to 30 seconds before the result is there.
I have an excellent internet connection.
I have only 1800 albums in my library which are almost all from Qobuz.
@Duckworp, I moved this to the ROCK category as this is not a technical support request for Roon support staff, and other users are providing suggestions.
Your library is getting close to the 100K track limit that Roon recommends moving to a Nucleus Plus (i7-based). As @Arindal noted, current generation of i3 devices may be more powerful than previous generation i7.
As you have an older i3, you may be running into CPU constraints due to the size of your library, and it is probably time to consider a new solution for your ROCK.
I’ll share my experience. I also had an i3 based Nucleus.
My library is much smaller than yours but every operations were super slow. Loading, searching took 30 to 90 seconds.
So I upgraded to Small Green Computer’s sonicTranspor i7.
Nucleus plus was sold out everywhere . But I didn’t want to buy another Nucleus anyway and I’m too lazy for DIY.
And I couldn’t be happier. Loading, searching take less than a couple of seconds with the sonicTransporter i7.
So same as basic Nucleus. If your library is just a little more complicated in terms of internal database handling (significant number of unidentified albums, boxsets, DSD albums, lots of classical references and alike), I have the suspicion 90k tracks might be already too much to handle smoothly for this CPU. I had a slightly less powerful CPU in my previous NAS which just collapsed at 70k tracks a year ago. Replaced it with a faster one (faster than your i3 Gen7) and it runs smooth again. Although adding albums to push the library towards 100k is also resulting in a certain sluggishness, you feel that it begins to reach the critical zone.
The NUC came with its own memory (ie the memory all NUCs have in them) on which Rock is held, as well as the Roon data. No music is on this internal memory. I then added a 2TB internal SSD drive for my music. Then I plugged in an external 2TB drive via USB which contains all of my son’s music.
After I read one of the posts above which said to try and not use external usb drives, I am moving the music we really want to keep over from that external drive to the internal 2TB drive (not the drive with Rock on) and will then unplug the external drive as soon as that is done.
Everything is slow. Search is not too bad but when I click on an Artist from search it can take 10-20 seconds. Then if I click on Discography it will take upto 30 seconds to display the discography. Then if I choose to play an album it will take upto 30 seconds to start playing the first track. If I save a Qobuz album to the library then for the next 5 minutes it slows down even more, with the circling circle and a message saying “adding x tracks etc”
If I reboot the router, the unmanaged switch and the roon NUC then it is fast again for some time before grinding to a halt again if I use it a lot.
I have culled my library and removed most DSD files after reading your replies above and it is now 75k tracks. Hopefully without an external hard drive and with fewer tracks it may speed up. If that does not work I will try the non-fan settings in the bios another post above recommended.
Do not forget to clean up the internal library and reboot the NUC twice.
Removing DSD files and boxsets, thereby cutting down the library, was helping in my case, but it is not a guarantee that things will be really snappy again. If you want to be on the safe side, try a significantly faster machine.
According to my experience, external HDD is not really a problem if it is solely for storing the music files and has nothing to do with internal database or alike.