For folks with large libraries, this is a known bug. I’ve inquired countless times and several folks have brought it up but it just appears to be something that continues to be overlooked.
I just pray someone from Roon is looking into it for the next full version. It completely bums me out when I want to switch tracks and have to wait over 30 seconds.
Ugh…
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What are you running Roon on? I had a similar issue with a Mac mini that just got slower and slower over time but once I switched to a dedicated NUC the issue was resolved.
I have about 100.000 songs on an external HDD. How big is your library?
3 Likes
Sonic Transporter i9. Through Optical Rendu, Ultra Rendu and other endpoints. I’ve tried everything. My connections are good. I have nearly 288K tracks in my library. I thought the ST i9 would maybe help when I bought it a year ago. But nope. It’s a known bug. Roon support is crickets. I’m screwed basically and it sucks after putting several thousand $ into my system - along with the blood, sweat and tears of managing and curating my library. JRiver handles it all fine.
It’s a server cache issue or something cause a reboot fixes it. For a few hours. It just sucks as I don’t even see it talked about anymore. Large physical libraries suffer. Damn.
Music stored on a NAS. Prolly around 10TB with plenty of room to expand. Except Roon can’t handle it. 
NAS may be your problem. Even with a 20K track library, moving from NAS to internal SSD on my i5 and i7 Linux cores was a major performance improvement.
Frustration and fascination lie so close together. I know this and can sympathize. If you want help, you have to post a perfect system and problem description in the support subgroup, so generally described it is not handled by support. Where do you want them to start? They already receive so many logs and give hints what it could mean in a specific case.
With an estimated 100,000+ users, 10 such problems would be the exception. It is reported people with large libraries here are very rare. Many solutions are also reported.
There I learned a lot, but also gave away a year without a real call for help. I wanted to try many things myself and today I realize, a bad file, a missing driver for the graphics card, the IPV6 protocol, the Tidal login, even a Windows update and much more can be the trigger. The best hardware and networks don’t ensure good progress. Mac, Rock, Linux and Windows have their very own problem areas that need to be solved. Sometimes iOS sometimes Android doesn’t really want to. Each problem is different.
With Roon, the data volume explodes especially because of the many links. It also makes a difference whether 288,000 tracks on 200,000 albums or only 30,000 albums are read in and whether 200,000 or only 10,000 different artists are linked here.
The i9 processor is certainly fast, but if fast audio analysis is set, that already takes a lot of power. If you use other virus scanners besides Microsoft, you further weaken the system. Wrong network settings ruin the best system. Where other programs don’t look closely (Jriver, Foobar2000…) Roon finds corruptions in files and these can bring the system almost to a standstill or even to a crash. If you connect an external TV, you can get new problems, especially with new powerful systems. Hybrid graphics is a brake with crash danger for Roon and complex games, if not everything is adjusted with the last perfection so that the double graphic cards don’t interfere with each other anymore.
The system hard drive should already be an SSD, the music is fast enough from the HDD. This is true for me even with a 10-year-old Acer 8943G without USB3. Internal is certainly better, but not always possible and rarely really a problem.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
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But it shouldn’t be. Is this a NAS issue or a large library issue, or a combination of both?
Yes there are clearly performance improvements using local disc verses NAS storage but the difference should be of the ‘a bit laggy’ magnitude rather than 30 seconds delay (assuming NAS does not need to spin up discs). Someone needs to get some Wireshark captures on the case and find out where the delays are, then present Roon with the evidence for an explanation.
So we can better assist you, please provide a brief description of your current setup using this link as a guide.
Make sure to describe your network configuration/topology, including any networking hardware currently in use, so we can have a clear understanding of how your devices are communicating.
Larger libraries definitely require more resources — We have some recommendations for large libraries over 250K tracks here:
If you have over 250K+ tracks in your library, consider us impressed! You’re among the top .01% of Roon users, and you have a library most of us could only dream of.
With libraries this large, we expect the right hardware will work, but it’s definitely not something that we test with in-house. Your best bet will be to get a beefy Roon OS or Windows setup (we do not recommend standard Linux or macOS Cores for this) with a fast new CPU and plenty of RAM.
Can you elaborate a bit on the legginess that you’re seeing?
Hey, thanks guys. Thing is, Roon still works. It’s just very slow at times to switch tracks. But there are never any dropouts or anything once the song starts playing.
And I’ve had many support tickets on this. It generally takes weeks before they respond and in all cases there just wasn’t any kind of solution. My NAS is robust and I never have issues with it. I know I have the option to move to an external SSD but that’s a ton of work when I have a system where everything works properly outside of Roon lagging. But I’ve tried many times to work with support and they suggest rebuilding my library etc. Other members have posted similar issues. I know they’re aware and I’ll just live with it in hopes that they can figure out why it’s doing this. I’ve made several changes the last year including new Ethernet switch box and Ethernet cables and consolidating my library to look at less folders. I’ve done about as much as I can do and will just hope there’s a solution in the future.
Thanks guys for the feedback!
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Hey guys. Here’s some info on my setup.
-
Details on your Core machine (OS, Hardware specs, Roon build)
Core is a Sonic Transporter i9 -
Details on your Remote(s) (OS, Hardware specs, Roon build)
Windows 10 Remote with latest Roon build -
Networking details (especially what hardware you’re using, how everything is connected, and anything notable about how it’s all configured)
Full Ethernet AT&T Fiber connection. Everything is ethernet hard-wired. -
Audio devices in use
Several endpoints such as Optical Rendu, Ultra Rendu. -
Library details (where your music is stored, whether you’re using a streaming service, how many tracks are in your library)
All files stored in a NAS. Approximately 288K files total. NAS is an Asustor brand. I don’t use any streaming services. Updated with latest software.
Thanks guys!
Spence
This has been happening for some time. And explained at length in previous requests. When you’re playing a song in Roon and switch to another track, it lags for up to 20-30 seconds before starting the song. If I reboot, it will work almost immediately, but it’s a server cache issue. The more songs I play, the worse the lag gets. So it’s an ongoing issue.
Thanks,
Spence
First thing I would do is move some files to ST on an external drive if there in no internal storage.
Select tracks from that storage location after you have added it and see if that helps
I have a windows core with 2 internal SATA hdd 16tb & 6tb with around 18.5TB of music and 344k tracks. Doesn’t stall or take anytime to play anything at all.
Machine is using an i7-10700 cpu and 16gb ddr4-2133 ram with a 256gb ssd m.2 nvme boot.
I gave up on a nas for music storage and now use it as backup for music.
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So, if I were to add an external drive with music files, that would connect directly to the ST?
And I’m sure it would run smoother but the only real test would be to load ALL of my music on an external drive and then connect to the ST.
The Asustor is not probably a great performer…most NAS are not for that matter
I think the idea is to configure two storage location from within Roon — your NAS and also the external drive. Then compare the performance of playing back the files on the drive with the performance of playing back from the NAS.
That said, I don’t believe that there will be much difference. I also experience the lag of everything in the user interface after perusing Roon for some time — that is, performing album and artist lookups, saving new albums into the library and, of course, playing music. I am nearing 200.000 tracks, and what I do have as ripped tracks is local to the Core computer, available on a SSD. The rest is from Tidal, and when the interface lags, there is no difference at all between Tidal and local tracks. The problem is not with the read speed of the music files from a local disk, or a NAS or even from an Internet streaming service.
I for the first time noticed that things were slowing down after going past 70.000 tracks if I remember correctly. I eventually found out how the memory usage steadily increases on Roon perusal, and learned to restart the server process on my Linux core to remedy the performance issue. At first these restarts were every 4-5 days, and I am now down to restarts near every day. It all depends on how much interaction with Roon there is — how many album searches, how many artist lookups, how many playbacks. Independently of library size, though, I have observed that my server begins to be unbearably slow as soon as it goes over 5,4 GB memory usage, more or less. It never eats up all of my 16 GB RAM. When it is above 5 GB, it is high time to restart the server and all is again back to normal — repeat and rinse. There clearly is a memory leak, or inefficiency of the garbage collector, or something of both. Just to be clear, I am talking about physical memory usage here, not total memory.
I have seen reports from other users who experience a runaway memory usage on Mac — independently from database size, Roon in a short time seems to eat up all available free RAM and then some. This must be some other problem altogether. To me it doesn’t seem to be related to this creeping memory usage increase and slowdown of every user interaction with the GUI we here are talking about.
The Roon backend seems quite inefficient for managing larger databases, and we all have seen the responses from Roon folks that those with (very) large databases and collections are a tiny minority. So there simply seems not to be much incentive for Roon to reimplement the backend to make it more robust and efficient. For that reason I have given up on looking for support on this. I eventually may prune my database to reduce its track count, or live with the problem and its workaround, or simply change platform if some day something more apt and performant comes along.
3 Likes
I do think there is an intermediate way for Roon to solve this without too much programming.
If after intial startup a user would limit the size of its library to a quite smaller number of tracks, by means of Focus e.g.), Roon could easily ‘ignore’ the rest of the database, freeing up memory, until a new Focus view is requested.
If that were developped and clearly explained to us users, performance could/would improve drastically.
Dirk
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So why is it that when I reboot the Core (STi9) if fixes the lagging. But after playing for a few hours it comes back. This appears to have nothing to do with the Asustor NAS, but the Roon Core. Correct me if I’m wrong?
I agree. It’s a memory issue. Which makes the point of me spending countless hours (and money) on a new storage solution when I’ll most likely get the same result. I just wish there was a way to get this fixed. Since the guys with the larger library have put the most time into their library and maintenance. I’m still hopeful though.
This is what I think, too. There may be other performance improvements when moving files from a NAS to local disk storage, but the slowly increasing lagging of the UI and slow-down of everything Roon seems to me not to be related to NAS usage. I and many others experience the same problem, without being NAS users.