Roon Nucleus RAM Upgrade?

I second Paul. Unless you have an unusually large library, I don’t think going over 8 gb is going to make much of a difference. And, I would upgrade a single stick of memory by buying new memory new in pairs, to get the same production run, but that is me.

Roon could not void your warranty for upgrading RAM unless they could prove that the RAM used or the person doing the upgrade damaged the Nucleus.

This was all fleshed out years ago. First, when car companies tried to void warranties when people used functionally equivalent aftermarket parts. Then when computer companies tried to do the same thing. Some even went as far as to put a seal on the box and say that the warranty was void if the seal were broken. All of that did not did not survive legal scrutiny in the courts…

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Ok! Thanks all for the replies! My library is pretty big, 15K albums and 250K tracks…not sure if that makes it a ‘necessity’ or not, but would be interested to try it out!
Thanks
Doug

What would more RAM do for you though?

Well at least from what people have posted here on the forum who are using Intel nucs as well as macs, they claim that the additional ram makes the interface run snappier, better data refresh, faster album loading, fewer crashes, etc. when i updated the ram in my mac mini years ago, my music server at the time Audirvana ran much snappier. And someways I thought my juiced Mac mini that had 16 GB of RAM in someways was faster than my nucleus plus, but still thought the DSP performance was better on the nucleus plus (convolution c dsd 256 upsampling, etc). So I am curious if more ram esp c a large library would make a diff in any of these areas that I would be able to notice when controlling from my ipad…if not, I will just send back the ram sticks I guess!

Greetings! I wanted to update this post as I went ahead and upgraded the RAM today on the nucleus plus. I added in two 8 GB RAM sticks by Crucial/Micron. The process is super easy taking less than five minutes from start to finish which included taking it off the audio rack, opening it up, switching out the ram, and putting it back on the rack, plugging everything back in. Will be interested to see if the performance gains remain after several days of use, but it only took a few seconds to note how much snappier the device ran when it came to loading images, completing searches and populating the results, jumping from artist to artist via the hyperlinks built into the software, etc. Certainly did not notice nor did I expect to hear any improvement in sound quality, but certainly the utility/function of the software is much closer to what I recall when I first subscribed in 2015. As many on the forum have noted, including myself, there was a significant slow down for a number of users after roon 1.6 was released (when Qobuz was added). Obviously the size of my library is quite large which is probably why 8 GB alone was not enough to load things as fast as 5 yrs ago…lots of virtual library additions plus two streaming services and 3+ TB in ripped CDs/hires downloads. So something to consider if you have giant library or at least more than 15,000 albums and 220,000 tracks like me and cheap to implement too!
Thanks
Doug

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I ordered an identical 4GB ram module to what’s installed in my Nucleus.

I don’t want to burst your bubble, but I just installed 2 8gb modules, and the system is considerably faster with loading album artwork, and processing. I have the standard Nucleus. Kind of surprised that it only comes with 4GB to begin with. The cost of the 4GB and the 8GB modules were the same. FYI.

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Not bursting my bubble…I agree with you 100% that it seems to perform much much better in all the areas you described! I am very glad I did it! I think anyone with a nucleus plus and a large library or those that don’t feel it isn’t as snappy as they thought it would be should definitely consider this cheap and easy upgrade! I would still like slightly faster load times of the Overview and Discover pages (they are still faster than before the RAM upgrade)…they still seem a tad sluggish compared with the near instant results/returns of everything else!
D

If 4GB is enough. Then, 8GB is more than enough.

sorry, just an expression. Didn’t mean any harm by it. I actually agree with you. 4gb plus another 4gb will probably show just as much improvement than I saw with 8+8. I just figured if I was buying a 4gb for the same price as an 8, then I may as well buy the 8, and another 8 for $35 while im at it. Again, 8 and16 will most likely show identical performance.

We do not throttle RAM usage. If you got a performance increase from replacing the RAM, it’s because the RAM got faster, or you are experiencing a placebo effect.

If you have too little RAM, Roon does not use slower storage to keep working, it just runs out and crashes.

Some systems (windows, macos, many linux distributions, etc…), depending on the install, will swap out the contents of less commonly used physical RAM to SSD/HDD. On those systems, you would feel a massive performance drop if you run out of physical RAM, and increasing RAM would prevent that drop. However, Roon OS does not do this. If you run out, you will crash.

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Are you saying that you have virtual memory disabled on the kernel you guys use with the Nucleus OS? That is the main way you would turn off low use or unused memory pages getting swapped on to SSD/HDD.

Why? Generally, even systems with way too much RAM still benefit from virtual memory being used.

Thank you! So in a nutshell your system should not perform any differently once the minimum RAM is reached, and anything past that up to the max of 32gb is essentially wasted memory?

The OS will use unallocated memory as I/O block cache. You can’t really turn this off in Linux (though I suppose you could use the tunables to try making it to use as little as possible – but I don’t see what is to be gained from that).

Roon keeps whatever it keeps in-memory, but I imagine it doesn’t try to load all artwork and such from the database into memory. It probably has a small cache in-memory. So the extra RAM can cache additional filesystem blocks that Roon isn’t keeping in-memory itself. But assuming you are using an SSD, this likely won’t translate into any material performance gain. It would help if you were using a mechanical drive, though.

FWIW, I run my Roon Core on a (repurposed) Dell PowerEdge R230 that has 32GB of RAM. I’ve never seen total memory (both application + I/O cache) exceed about 4GB, with allocated RAM averaging around 1.5GB (my library is pretty small in comparison to yours, however). So the rest of the RAM really is just sitting there unused by anything.

You keep using the term “virtual memory”, which can mean 2 things. I’m going to break that up into 2 terms that are more specific:

  • swap or swapping, which is the act of transferring the contents of RAM to less expensive storage like disk
  • virtual addressing, which is a virtual layer for memory addressing that then can be mapped to physical memory as desired.

We do not tell the kernel to use swap. Virtual addressing is still used, but no swapping is done to disk.

We ship with no HDD, and while it may not be as bad with modern SSDs, flash cell wearing is still a thing.

Besides system admin benefits (which do not apply here since users don’t have access to admin the operating system), the argument for swap is that VFS cache can be increased as less commonly used programs are swapped out. This does not apply to a single purpose appliance which limits itself to a small section of the filesystem for reads/writes (the Roon database). The benefits for VFS cache are moot for audio files. See @cwichura’s comment above for a good analysis of the situation.

Additionally, having parts of Roon swap out would be a disaster in performance, especially if the only goal is to have VFS cache increased.

As your library increases, or as our system requirements grow, you can benefit from more RAM. However, more RAM will prevent crashes (if you are having them) and not increase performance.

On Roon OS, 4GB is more than enough for about 90% of Roon subscriber’s libraries. Another 9.9% could use 8GB. The remainder will need more but are going to have a bad experience anyway due to the experience not being optimized for that much music.

I don’t need 8GB, but the fact that I found the identical chip to what’s in my Nucleus, I grabbed it.

Good to know. Thank you!

I found this interesting. It suggests running in dual channel might bring some benefits, but not for the reasons I thought.