I track the energy draw from my Intel NUC with Roon on. This is on Ubuntu 22.04 but not sure that’s entirely relevant here.
As a software engineer myself I’m particularly keen on things not wasting CPU. I’m perfectly fine with Roon drawing whatever it needs when music is playing or doing housekeeping like backups. I’m cool with it spending a bit of time doing checking on your connected music services.
My issue is that it seems to continually keep rescanning files, even when there are perfectly good APIs that let you know when files and folders change so that you don’t have to poll.
However, on average I would say it uses between 15-50% in the background and this is on a 12th Generation Intel and you can do a LOT with that kind of CPU power.
At night now I use HomeAssistant to kill the Roon process when my house alarm goes on and then restarts the service when it goes off to be a tad more ‘green’. I shouldn’t have to do this though/
What do other peoples Roon processes do - they go largely quiescent once the music stops?
I had a look right now, running Roon Server on Win 11 (22H2), and i cant see any consumption at all while idle… Stopped playing music while looking at the CPU Time column in activity manager, and no ticking up on the clock while stopped.
Started playback after 3-4minutes and Activity Manager added one second of CPU Time…(And then i upsample to Max PCM ‘Integer’ also…)
So, no, not much activity while idle. But i know that Roon does “phone home” occasionally so i am assuming it doesn’t stay completely quiet…
It’s active all the time on Rock. I can see the network being used even when not in use and I am away from home at moment it’s been idle since Saturday morning but still has managed to download 3.2MB per day. Not huge but it shows it’s doing stuff when idle. I can check my network remotely via UniFi app so I can see exactly what it’s doing.
@Simon_Arnold3 So with Rock, are you able to see the CPU usage?
Looking at the network usage is difficult for me because I have other things running on the NUC, though I wonder whether I could use netstat to isolate what Roon uses. The network traffic doesn’t really bother me actually - 3.2MB is very low.
No I can see network usage on my server via my networks controller out of my home. I can see it’s been busy even when it’s not being used which shows it’s doing something. Not huge amounts but stil active. It does poll all endpoints to make sure they are alive, if you have network storage mounted it will check it’s still live to, wakes up NAS devices and stops them from sleeping. It does regular checks for metadata updates and will rescan library at certain times every 4 hours is default and will run backup at times you have set.
I’d be interested if any others could look at their CPU usage.
If other people don’t see a lot of use of CPU then maybe there’s something wrong with my setup. It would be interesting if Roon could comment whether this is correct or not as well.
maybe a change in the os in the last days? Since a few days i hear the fan of my Roon Rock Nuc12wshi3 a few meters next to the Rock when no music is played. Bevore nothing …
Running Roon on a fanless NAS equipped with one of the fastest Intel Celerons. That’s a low-TDP mobile CPU not as powerful as your Core Gen 12. Intel is claiming a thermal power of just 10 Watts for that one under standard load at nominal frequency.
CPU usage with roon process stopped: 1%
CPU usage with roon in idle: 0-1%, jumping to 3-4% once per minute
CPU usage with roon playing multiple very broad streams (DSD128, PCM192 FLAC 5.1 and alike) with heavy cross-coding and DSP simultaneously: 12-18%
CPU´s energy consumption is not particularly anything I worry about…
running a qnap ts-410e with roon in a container.
here complete load during playing redbook ch from the ssd‘s.
part of roon processes is much less than 1%.
without playing anything the load is nearly the same.
Mostly idle. It definitely wakes up a lot and spikes. The overall system load is ~0.2-0.4 and it’s running about 6 other services, so I’m not too concerned.
I am running Roon ROCK in a VM on Proxmox, while idle the VM uses 0,5% of it’s 4 cores, the RAM usage can’t be determined since there are no guest plugins.
While running music, it is like 2-4% based on the source quality with only -3db headroom applied.
While adding music, it get’s up to 40-50% (2 core fast) or 80-90% (4 core fast/on demand), while still beeing able to play music without any stutter etc. to multiple zones.
Same problem with my machine (i3 12th gen, Windows 11), but it happens if I RDP into the machine, Roon process jumps from 0.1% to 5-7% when idling, and stays there until i restart Roon.
Think problem is with Roon Core UI and RDP service.
Plan to try Roon Server, so without UI and use other machine as Remote.
Roon support said they will enable logging for my account, so hope they’ll see what is Roon doing while not doing anything (and if its bitcoin mining, hope they’ll share some profit with me:)
Until Roon fixes this issue, i am using Power Saver mode on Windows, so CPU stays below 1ghz, which is also more than enough for normal Roon function (even with HQPlayer oversampling to 1.5Mhz:)
I have Roon running exclusively on an Intel NUC11TNHi5 running Arch Linux (OS on NVMe, music data on a 8 TB Samsung SSD) - without playback/in idle mode I could see a CPU usage between 0.3 and 1.5 %, during playback (streaming Flacs to a NAIM streamer) CPU usage increased and cycled between 1.3 and 3.0 %.
Worth mentioning … I spent quite a lot of time identifying unknown albums manually. I could imagine that having a significant number of unidentified albums (which will cause Roon to check for updates/trying to identify those albums in the background) might result in a high(er) background activity - especially in case of a large collection and/or slow storage media (“aka HDD”).
Side note … a lot of the unidentified albums on my end was caused by the way I entered track and disc information for multi-disc albums (I have them counting up across all discs).
One more thought … I encountered some really strange delays when dealing with collected album art. I have a few scripts resizing large pictures to a standard 600x600 resolution (which I use to embed in the Flac audio file). At some point one script played up, in the end it turned out that the issue was caused by some strange characters in some pictures file names (mainly invisible characters) affecting meta data extraction.
My first idea to troubleshoot what going (wr)on(g) would be to check the corresponding log file(s) … this usually gives a pretty good overview about what Roon is currently doing … you should see playback progress as well as background activities logged there. On my system, the logs are written to /var/roon/RoonServer/Logs.
Would be interesting to know a bit more about your setup (in terms of size and specs)
