I’ve been running my Roon server on my Synology DS918+ for a few years now and it’s mostly ok, but lately it’s been stopping in the middle of tracks and the app goes unresponsive for a couple minutes and then comes back.
Other performance issues during these glitches include next track artwork not populating until the middle of a track or near the end, and not being able to access parts of the app (Discover section, etc.)
Usually a reboot of the Synology fixes it for a while (sometimes days/weeks) but it reoccurs.
Synology is running an Intel Celeron J3455 1.5Ghz, 4GB RAM, NAS HDDs (no SSDs)
How would performance compare to if I picked up a Roon Nucleus and ran things from there.
I have a library of <1000 FLACs and 90% of the time stream from Qobuz.
I exactly use ds918+ as roon core before. When I use roon remote on iPhone or iPad to browse and play album, scrolling was not smooth, artwork takes time to load. I switched to Mac mini pro m2 and finally realized it’s caused by the machine. Everything is smooth and responsive now.
Celeron is below Roon’s minimum requirement, so a Nucleus would be better. So would a faster Synology (1522+ is working well with a library over 50K tracks).
Also, make sure the roon’s own library (not the music files) must be on SSD for performance reason. roon says if you don’t, you’ll experience performance issues as well.
The music files themselves may be saved on HDDs.
I’ve run Roon on the same NAS up ‘till a couple of weeks ago. The Roon database was on a USB attached SSD and the NAS had 16gb RAM installed. I had a schedule defined to stop and start the Roon service - just in case.
Performed well for years and I’ve only moved away recently as more performant hardware was freed up for use.
That particular Celeron CPU is really underpowered in terms of single-core performance as it is a pretty slow quadcore. I would expect roon´s reaction time to be already on the sluggish side even with a small library, but running the database on magnetic discs on top sounds like things might stutter to an annoying level easily.
Moving to Nucleus or to a properly-suited Synology NAS with database on SSD would dramatically improve the performance. DS723+ or DS923+ would be the ideal choice as they have a very performant CPU plus additional M.2 slot for the database.
Celeron is not equal to Celeron. Roon´s own recommendation to avoid Celeron CPUs dates back to 2018 and might had been true back then. In the meantime, several suitable Celerons have been released, some even outperforming the Nucleus´ i3 with ease.
For a library that size, even something modestly outdated like a Celeron J4025 should do the job if only database is on SSD.
This particular Celeron seems to be from 2016 though, and it didn’t have very fast cores even back then.
Library of that size should just fit in RAM anyway. Keeping the database on an SSD would be good, but in case of Synology, if it is used for anything else, adding SSD cache, if supported, might be of greater benefit in general.
Sounds like I’ll try a Roon Nucleus or Roon Rock installed on something else that’s faster.
My Synology is used also predominantly for Plex and serves up mkv locally streamed 4K files flawlessly, but yeah it seems to be hit and miss for Roon.
Again, most of my listening is just streamed via Qobuz anyways so was hoping that I could get away with the below Roon specs and have for a few years, but notice the sluggishness now that I’m using it more and more.
As Roon mentions in the manuals, whether tracks are local or streamed does not matter for library performance. With increased usage and DB growth, that Celeron is definitely becoming a bottleneck.
Nucleus, IMHO, is not the best value if you are even slightly handy with computers. ROCK (or even a regular Roon Server) on a spare reasonably fast PC should be fine, and you still can keep the actual music (if you do have anything local at all) on the Synology.
I used a DS918+ with 2.1TB of local tracks, totalling about 45,000 tracks, before it died and I updated to a 1522+. The 918+ ran flawlessly with a library of that size.
Isn’t there another thread analyzing that Roon performance is dependent not just on the library size, but even more so on the number of unidentified albums or something?
It might work, if everything is in perfect shape, but it is always good to have some extra headroom.
There are a lot of those threads, and Roon has admitted it (this was the epicenter of the earthquake, as it were). It also depends upon one’s network quality, disk/RAID configuration, and many other things. If you want to see a little more about my particular configuration decisions with a Synology NAS, see A Roon on (Synology) NAS Primer.
I have a Synology 920+ with the DB on the spinning disks, i do however have 32 GB ram and SSD Cache in place. Very rarely have issues, only have 30k tracks though.
M1 MAC Mini is working very well as Roon core for me (note - not ROCK). Low power consumption and good performance. If you keep your music on the Synology you can easily get away with the basic spec Mini.