Hello,
Roon is an incredibly useful and well architected software that fits the niche very well. The ability to have full integrated access to a library of music, controlled from an app while sitting comfortably before our stereo systems is bliss.
With that said, it seems a lot of us have experienced sporadic issues with the Roon Remote iOS app. The most problematic is this app crash that we run across, where after some short period (varies from device to device), the app crashes.
I’ve experienced this crash, and it stinks - kinda ruins the listening session. Makes me glad I keep a few analog sources around.
Over the past year, I would say the app has been very stable - until recently (past week for me). Recently - the app won’t stay open more than 10-30 seconds.
I’m a software developer, so I was getting curious why the app was crashing. I did all the tricks: closed all other apps, toggled airplane mode, rebooted the phone. No luck. I have an app that allows me to see the memory/cpu usage. What I saw (I think) explains the issue.
There seems to be a state that when launching the Roon remote app, the app starts using A LOT of memory. We are talking several gigabytes.
In my scenario- this is iOS 15.6.1, iPhone 13 Pro. This device comes with 6 GB ram. The attached image is a screenshot of the memory/cpu utilization. The first vertical line labeled “bg” is when I launched the Roon remote app. You can see the memory usage jump and event max out the available memory, in which case iOS will kill the app. The troubling part is just how much memory is being requested. Baseline memory is around 65%, meaning at the time of launching Roon - there is about 2.1 GB of free memory. The app pretty quickly uses all this up and you can see the next vertical line labeled “fg” is when the Roon app crashed and the memory/cpu is reclaimed.
Would be great to hear back from the software team on what they find when instrumenting the app for memory allocations or memory leaks.
I’m happy to help too - just reach out.
Best regards,
Kevin