Its a pitty that you cannot check your roon on rock for cpu performance and memory
A black box which is really total black
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Well, I know Roon keep saying 8gb ram in a NUC is enough but it has been a while since I last seen that and there has been a few changes. I popped off the lid to the Roon Rock NUC to check and I do have 8GB at the moment but as a single ram module.
This does mean itās not utilising dual channel memory modeā¦ however, it does mean itās a nice easy and cheap addition to expand it to 16gb and benefit from the extra memory and the faster dual channel memory mode. So, Iāve ordered it and weāll see if this makes a difference
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Certainly true, but I doubt such a performance monitor would always lead to a clear explanation what is the root of the slowness. The app of my NAS running roon offers a pretty professional resource monitor but I am not always able to track down the problem despite from seeing entire CPU or single cores peaking for some seconds when performing computing-intense operations. At least I was able to understand when 4GB RAM was not enough so I upgraded to 8 which is never coming to a limit ever since but nevertheless I was encountering sluggishness at times (a year ago).
I wished in a future version of roon there would be some kind of basic resource monitor showing the user how many albums approx. he could add until the systems enters a stage of overloading. Even if it would not be precise, just like a BEVĀ“s battery range being eaten up fast than the driver can imagine, it still would help to know the limits of the machine and its connection to roon servers. I suspect that in some cases it might be the local hardware reaching a tipping point, in others the cooperation between the local machine and roonĀ“s cloud servers. Just a theory.
In any case, I find it useful to make an experiment checking if disabling parts of the library and cleaning it up would help performance. With my performance problems this was always the case so far, so I disabled certain folders and roon runs smooth like butter.
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Itās an M1 with 16gb ram. I believe I only had 8gb on the nuc. Library size is currently at close to 7500 albums just from streaming. Working on getting my local library hard drive converted to a Mac format and then Iāll have little over 10,000 albums combined. But overall performance is just better. Everything loads up quick. But there still is a slight delay in searching compared to using native streaming app but nothing like before. When I last tested the nuc without the local drive hooked up, search felt unusable. Everything was taking long time to find results. Would be embarrassed to show someone roon like this.
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Thanksā¦ Iām going to see how the extra memory with the Roon Rock NUC goesā¦ only a Ā£30 upgrade to get it to 16gb so worth a try before looking at more substantial Ā£ options!
Those would be an up-to-date NUC with 32gb ram or, the M2 with 24gb ram but base SSD as I use external drives. Even if the extra memory works for now, it would mean that Roons advice of only needing 8gb is now defunctā¦ weāll see. Iāll report back here as to how it impacts the performance as no change could mean its a software problem or, Rock issue.
If this means having some 125,000 tracks in your library, it is considered to be a pretty big one requiring a significant amount of computing power on the coreĀ“s side.
That might be a result of the sheer number of tracks and the fact that roon is requiring a combination of local database crawling, streaming service and cloud search.
If you want to go for my experiment to disable some folders, I suggest to start with either those containing a lot of unidentified albums, big files (especially DSD) or albums with lots of references (lots of tracks or artists per album, boxsets and alike).
Am i understanding it right: the storage folder for approx 2,500 albums (equalling maybe 30,000 tracks or more?) was unavailable for roon yet not cleaned out /removed from the internal database? That might have contributed to the sluggishness.
Regarding roonĀ“s advice to use 8GB: I made some experiments and for me 8GB worked fine for everything south of 100,000 tracks. Adding additional albums was leading to roon needing more memory than 8GB and contributing to slowness. Would not take that as a precise threshold but as RAM is cheap I would recommend to have 16 for every big library.
Well on iMac, it restored on old library and showed like 40k of tracks not associated with the current setup and still had no issues with search. Iām cleaning that up now. Iāll probably reset my rock rock and see how it performs but happy with iMac performance. But issue was when wife was using it for Lightroom and Photoshop. At least in old IMac, thatās where ran into stuttering. I can alway just switch over to my Naim app during those times instead of just having slow performance the whole time on the roon rock.
I thought ROCK cannot address more than 8GB RAM
So i might put 2x32 into my nuc8i7 
It can address as much as the NUC hardware can. But many NUCs canāt address more than 32. Youād have to look up the specs for the NUC.
But ROCK wonāt be faster with more RAM (except a little bit if you start using dual-channel memory and didnāt previously). It just crashes if there isnāt enough RAM.
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Would be embarrassed to show someone roon like this.
This is something I donāt get. Iād be surprised if not a fairly large part of the Roon usebase are people whoāve experienced it at a users home (or in a shop), and liked it enough to try/buy for themselves, at least thatās the way with most Roon users I know personally. In its current state I would never show it off to visitors, the chances of it just being an embarassment to have spent money on is way too big. Indeed, at least two of my friends who got Roon subscriptions after using at my place have since quit, itās not working well enough for them to be worth the hassle or money. Both are extremely computer savvy (work in IT), but the promise of a turn key solution after first set up is no longer fullfilled. If they want to tinker, they have their own projects to work on.
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IMO, and perhaps others too, the software is waiting for an update to address a few issues. We are patiently waiting. Hence comments such as:
Rock doesnāt include virtual memory paging tricks, it either fits into the available ram and works, or it doesnāt and crashes. There are posts about this, bottom line, even an enormous library will fit into 16GB ram.
What is enormous?
500 K files?
Yeah, Iāll be honest, itās all a bit vague - but the Roon knowledge base says 8GB = 12k+ albums. Not sure how scalable that is, but perhaps 16GB = 24k+ albums, so 32GB = 48k+ albums, and so on??
I currently have 16 GB RAM
HyperX Impact HX424S14IB2K2/16 Arbeitsspeicher 16GB Kit*(2x8GB)
Seems to be to less
As I understand it, if it doesnāt crash, you have enough RAM.
If it does crash, you probably still have enough RAM. Modern operating systems use āvirtual memoryā, so the effect of ānot having enough RAMā is mainly to slow things down (see āThrashingā), not to make them crash.
But ROCK doesnāt swap to disk, thatās the point that was made. Either everything fits into RAM, then it works and more RAM does NOT make it faster. Or it doesnāt fit, then it crashes. There is no āit gets slower because part of the virtual memory is paged out to diskā
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What!? Itās Linux, isnāt it? Who would write an app that requires memory-locked pages? Are they allocating contiguous blocks somewhere?
[Later] OK, I looked at the references. Having never paid much attention to ROCK, didnāt know that. Still find it hard to believe.