Hi @Brian,
Many thanks for that frank and insightful post, I’m sure it appreciated by the community.
Given Roon’s “intent [not] to endorse one platform over another” and that even though this might pain you further, may I suggest that whilst this situation exist for extremely large libraries that a guidance note is added to the Roon Knowledge Base FAQ: What are the minimum requirements?
Hi @brian,
Thanks you for the very candid and clear explanation! That certainly helped to understand what’s going on with macOS version.
Based on that I just put together Win 10 server on Intel Skull Canyon NUC6i7KYK, with i7, 32GM RAM, and Samsung 950 Pro 512 GB PCIe Flash SSD.
Already in two days 50k albums imported, and not a single case of dropouts!
Also I can confirm that Windows version is MUCH faster that macOS on large library. Now Roon server is blazing fast in any function - launch (2-3 min vs. 5-10 min), scanning folders with ~1mil AIFF files on Synonoly NAS (30 min vs. >1 hour), pulling metadata and adding 50k albums (2 days vs. 1 week), searching in the music library (5-10 vs. 30-300 seconds), and upon demand audio analysis starting playback (1-2 vs. 5-10 seconds).
Depending on the task Roon server on Win 10 is 5-10x faster than on macOS with +/- similar HW!!!
The only downside that I observed with Roon server running on Win 10 - the App is very regularly crashing (3-4 times per day completely; and once every two hours becoming non-responsive, but then again recovering). If somebody in Roon is interested, I can provide the log file.
Adding 50k+ albums is heavy workload, and after whole libabry will be completely imported, the server might become more stable. I will continue to report progress. However, what I have discussed with other users with very large libraries on Win 10, they also have issues with the regular daily or every second day crash of the Roon server app on Win 10, even when the whole library audio analysis is fully completed.
In this respect masOS App was much more stable. While it was having dropouts, and wasn’t useful to search music, it almost never crashed. However, this unfortunately is common issue of Windows OS and any SW running on it.
To deal with this issue I have put on the server small App called “Restart On Crash”, which is looking after the Roon.exe. If Roon is crashing or becoming non-responsive for longer time, it is completely closed and relaunched. This is not 100% bulled proof solution, but some 2/3 of cases are automatically taken care and Roon is nicely restarted.
Along these lines besides improving Roon server stability on Win 10, it would be great to see if Roon team could add two features in some of the future releases:
@brian, I would appreciate your input in HW requirements to run very large 50-100k album server. What Motherboard, CPU (cores & clock), RAM (size and which DDR4 speed), which type of Flash storage/ in RAID 0 or not for the Roon App and database, what power supply, 1GB ETH or multiple 1GB ETH link aggregation between the server PC and NAS? Which of these elements are the most important for max fast search and stable Roon server operations?
Thank you so much for making this wonderful Server and Apps - experience of music exploration within the simple and beautiful UI, search with rich interconnections, and high quality playback is just MAGIC!!!
Janis
Great feedback!
With Roonserver, this is already a setting (accessible via the system tray icon)
Yes, on macOS, if one knows where and how.
In Win it is somehow more complex.
For basic user would be great help to simplify life, by putting it in Roon own settings. IMO
Hi @Janis,
Great that you have made progress here. The NUC spec you list is pretty good and the speed of the SSD being the thing that helps most with database load, boot-up etc. 2500mbps seems about as quick as you can get just now…and that is quick.
I have something slightly less powerful (but similar) running about 30k albums.
My SSD is about 1200 read speed so half yours. A full NUC shutdown and restart is about 20 seconds. Roon start and scan of local drive is about 1min.
I don’t get any crashes at all though on the NUC. Can you confirm if you installed roonserver.exe or just roon.exe to run as the Roon core ?
Roonserver.exe doesn’t carry the overhead of graphics requirements so you might find that just helps a bit. Failing that you may want to let ALL the background tasks complete and then re-assess stability. It could take you 1-2 weeks to complete the Background Audio Analysis for example.
It was Roon Server running on Windows that René was describing… Right-click on the running Roon Server icon, and you should see the menu item to select auto startup…
Thank you @ncpl for raising this point!
It is roon.exe not roonserver.exe actually.
I would try to migrate to Roonserver, but how to do correctly upgrade and connect Roonserver to the library database I have created in Roon?
See if this gives you what you need.
https://community.roonlabs.com/t/how-do-i-move-my-library-over-to-roonserver/3195
This just occurred on my Roon Core, running via Roon Server on a Mac Mini 2011, SSD. My track count was stable at about 65,000 (same count as when running Roon Server on a Synology, pointing to the same Synology media folder) and then just started progressively dropping, then re-importing.
Thanks Eric. I’m moving to a custom-build PC running a minimal Lubuntu installation in the longrun.
I just need to figure out the components list. The processor is the main sticking point—i5 or i7 for a headless PC running Roon Core (<100,000 tracks) and a Plex server? I’d love any input you might have.
@ncpl and @philr, that you for guidance to move from roon.exe to roonserver.exe.
It all went super smooth, after move to headless core, the server imported remaining 10k albums smoothly and has been running for two days w/o any crashing or responsiveness issues.
Now I started to perform audio analysis. Sometimes it gets stuck on some file and doesn’t move forward. However, after turning it off and on again, it continues to make progress. Do you know what is causing this issue? Can I see on which file it is getting stuck?
Janis
Sorry to jump in on this support topic, but once again I’m just fascinated by the library sizes mentioned here - 40k and 70k albums just seem unfathomable (as a circa 1k album man).
If you’re in any way inclined, I’d be really interested to hear more about your background and how you managed to build such vast collections…
I found this happen also. Best way forward at the moment is to look at the logs. Search for [analysis] from the bottom of your log files for periods where you know the analysis stalled. I saw several files/tracks repeatedly appear here.
A bit of trial and error revealed one album that had files that Roon didn’t like. They weren’t flagged as corrupt but dbpa also couldn’t convert them. It was free download sampler album so I binned it.
Analysis completed after that.
Hope that helps
I’m super happy to report that after upgrade to Roonserver the 70k album library is up and running stable, fast, and without anydropout case for a week! 
Thank you Roon team and community for help and guidance!
One more happy customer…
I’m with Steve - seventy thousand albums; I can’t get my head around that…
Excellent. That is really good info for others to reference as and when.
Now you can start getting to know the s/w and fixing any albums that didn’t get an auto-ID match. Winter is coming…lots of long dark nights 
This is a really valuable thread, and thanks particularly to @brian for your explanation regarding mono memory management.
The things that drove me here were iTunes performance hit with >20K albums, and the poor home sharing experience, with no faith they would change. It’s your transparency and clear dedication to getting this right and offering a great experience, constantly striving for better, that will have me happily stumping up the cash when my 14d trial runs out.
I’m also having performance issues, but so much more manageable knowing the path ahead.
Of course my own wishes for swifter more meaningful browsing using metadata will only test performance further, but I’m sure you guys are ready for the challenge! And if you want another 99% percentile library size, info/tag obsessive, on OS X, not to mention .NET SaaS experienced experience designer, for road testing and feedback, I’m in!
I have been experiencing this problem and reporting it since the spring. I hadn’t seen this acknowledgement by Roon before today and am glad to see Roon is working on it.
Yes, I have a very large library on OSX and my files do the disappearing act from time to time. I noticed that when Roon is watching a folder it really does not like anything in the folder to change! Nothing added or removed. Or, heavens forbid, that a file which was put into iTunes’ “Automatically add to iTunes” folder gets moved into its proper Artist/Album folder when iTunes starts up and is set up to organize files.
There are two unpleasant workarounds. One is to quit Roon before adding/subtracting files, then restart Roon and let it go through the scanning process. The other is to Disable the Watched Folder while adding/subtracting, and then re-Enabling that folder. Again, long scanning process.
Roon people, any updates on progress on fixing this?
Thanks.