Roon Server and Roon Appliance have same Process Name in Windows

I have installed RoonServer and then reinstalled Roon to run on same computer as the server (as per instructions). The Task Manager show two Roon processes running, one of which is the Roon Server (in Properties) and the other Roon Appliance. It seems to me it would be helpful if the Roon Server process had the name ‘RoonServer’ to identify it as the server process? Apart from that (trivial?!) comment, everything appears to be fine.

Have done that and all works running OS X as the Control Remote and following the instructions above. I did not uninstall Roon before I installed Roon Server - I now see that I cannot uninstall Roon as Roon Server install seems to have removed it, but on start up I see there are 2 Roon’s running in task manager?

Is this correct? if not how do I uninstall Roon without uninstalling Roon Server

Hey @Simon – are you running Roon and RoonServer on the same computer?

No, running RoonServer on the headless music server running Win 8.1 and the control remote on OS X on the same network. I uninstalled everything from the music server except for the database and re-installed - there are still 2 x Roon.exe running in Task Manager - so that must be normal behaviour, just wanted to check with you guys?

Yeah, those should have more distinctive names. We’re going to look into it. Thanks for the report @Simon!

Mike, to be clear though as my question has not been answered, are there supposed to be 2 x Roon.exe running in Task Manager with “only” Roon Server installed?

Yes, they’re different processes, which should have more distinctive names for clarity’s sake.

Mike a little more clarification please, are they both required to run RoonServer, I assume they are because it installs them like that but to clear, could you expand on this and why there are 2 processes?

@Simon, here is clarification you seek:

There are 2 processes when you install and run RoonServer, on Windows or on Mac OSX.

RoonServer.exe and RoonAppliance.exe

RoonServer.exe is very very lightweight, and all it does is watchdog RoonAppliance.exe and provide the system tray icon on Windows or the menubar icon on OSX.

RoonAppliance is the real library and audio manager. If you kill RoonAppliance, RoonServer will restart it. If you kill RoonServer, RoonAppliance will immediately terminate. They are both mandatory and work in conjunction with each other.

The problem you guys are seeing is that Windows 7+ taskmanager shows the process names in the detailed view, but the normal view contains a friendly application name. Both exe files have the same friendly name, “Roon”. I know, very confusing. We will fix this in the next build.

The reason for the 2 processes split up is reliability. If you have a headless server machine somewhere in a rack, and Roon crashes, runs out of memory, etc, the last thing you want to do is fiddle around with the machine that is annoying to access. The RoonServer is so very lightweight and simple that the likelihood of it having bugs or being affected by resources limitations is much lower. In an ideal world, you would never crash or have issues, but shit happens, and when it does, we wanted to give you the best experience by automatically making sure all is good.

2 Likes

Thanks Danny, that explains it beautifully. Tech heads like me need to understand what is going on and you have done that marvellously.

Awesome work on Roon Server BTW, men usage has decreased by 100mb and I am now down to 36 processes. Great work and its rock solid stable.

Did you do any SQ improvement? I have yet to put in decent session but already I think I notice changes.

Well, not hitting the GPU will definitely create less electrical noise in your system.

We’ve seen just scrolling around in Chrome affect the SQ on a DAC 1 meter away and not connected to the computer.

btw, this was fixed in build 55