That memory consumption starts out around 800MB but just steadily increments. After a couple of days it is up to 2.5GB RAM use and it starts to slow down.
By 3.5GB it is becoming unusably slow.
By 4.5GB it starts pausing during playback and connections start to be dropped.
Closing and relaunching Roon Server reset the problem… and then it starts all over again.
It has been this way for months. I figured that t was the same slow-down that others mention so have mostly been waiting for a fix but getting very frustrated with it now.
Let me know if there is anything else I can do to help.
Roon Server Machine
Intel NUC i5-6260U. 8GB RAM. 256GB SSD
Windows 10 Pro x64. 22H2 Installed 18/08/2021 OS build 19045.4046
Running Windows Server client (for backups) but nothing else.
Windows defender antivirus and windows firewall are both OFF.
Networking Gear & Setup Details
1Gb ethernet to TP-Link network switch to router.
Library is on a Synology DS918+ NAS on the same 1Gb network switch.
NAS has 16GB RAM with a 7TB RAID6 in 4x3.6TB
Network only very lightly loaded. Not a lot else going on.
Connected Audio Devices
NONE.
Multiple playback zones around the house are mostly Pi DACs (Allo BOSS, BOSS2, the odd HiFiBerry) plus a couple of airplay devices.
I do use multiple zones most days and I switch UI between PC and Android and Apple devices and I do sometimes/often transfer audio from one zone to another.
Number of Tracks in Local Library
The bulk of it is in a single NAS volume that is 8544 files in 761 folders.
Around 199GB altogether.
I have a couple of other smaller volumes on that NAS and one windows server for podcasts etc.
Services
Tidal and Quobuz
I sometimes find the Qobuz service makes things a bit unstable (big pauses in waiting for search results or playback) and when that happens I disable the Qobuz service which seems to help a bit but when memory consumption approaches 3GB disabling Quobuz does not make much difference.
Here is another occasion, after rebooting less than 48 hours ago RamMap is clearly showing that Roon Server has grabbed 2.5GB of memory. Surely that is a serious memory leak?
I see you have 8gb RAM for you Windows machine running Roon Server. Whilst a small library can cope with 8gb RAM, with Windows as well I’d recommend 16gb as a minimum.
Thanks, but this Synology NAS is a DS918+… so it only has a Intel Celeron J3455… a lot less powerful than the NUC. A dedicated NUC seemed a better way to go, and easier to swap out.
My library is only 9000 files. I think that is pretty tiny.
I think any app (outside of large scale simulations with huge data) needing 8GB of working RAM is ridiculous. But the issue here is not just the amount needed, it is that the memory (and performance) is being lost as it runs. Whilst it is using 800MB the performance during the first few hours after startup is perfectly fine… just a few % of CPU. If the app is using more memory to hold live data just to slow itself down then it should not. If it stays in that same state it had at startup then it will be much faster.
I have been a software developer for 36 years. This insane memory use is just wrong. If it is really using up to 16GB somehow (which I doubt) then giving it more memory will just slow it down as there will be more to process. A huge RAM cache is only useful if you have enough CPU oomph to index+search it. Optimum cache size in this case is clearly a lot less than 2GB.
I can run a complex web database application with many gigabytes of data in storage (on HDD), on a low power server with just 1GB of memory… and it runs hundreds of times faster than Roon… instant response from a web server like apache with an SQL database to gigabytes of files on disk… no need for lots of RAM.
I still think this is a memory leak. Maybe just in the Windows version of Roon Server?
Do people running on Rock or Mac see similar slow-down?
I have also used Roon Server on Windows 10 (Dell Optiplex micro i5, 16gb RAM) with Ubiquiti Unifi Controller, Plex Server with a local library of 10000 and a Qobuz library of 60000 or so.
Your theory of a RAM leak could be correct, but I didn’t experience this.
I use Rock now for simplicity
After using Roon for over 3 years I’ve come to the conclusion Roon isn’t normal software
Hi @Andrew_Beveridge,
Please upload a copy of your database. You can use these instructions to find your database. Once you have compressed the database you can upload it here.
But it is 3GB. Do you REALLY want me to upload it all here?
My Roon Server is really barebones… does not even have ZIP or 7zip on it. It is taking 20 minutes just to copy it to a shared folder (on same drive) just so something else can ZIP it.
Correction, it is actually 4GB in 20,802 files in 96 subfolders.
It is taking forever just to copy (averaging about 1MB/s) because most files are v.small.
That 4GB number is pretty suspicious. Is this why Roon only recently started to go v.slow?
Please tell me you are not just trying to cache the whole database in RAM are you?
When HDD access time is just 50 milliseconds or less?
My music-library is pretty small. That would be bonkers. Properly hash and index, please. Do not trust C++/java library class handlers to do this for you.
Seriously, this thing (Roon server, not the file-copy) should run at least 100x faster.
Certainly I have to reboot my ROCK at least once a week and sometimes every few days. No diagnostics so cannot tell why I need to do it but a reboot speeds things up when they get annoyingly slow or unresponsive.
You want to look at Roon’s home screen to find the total of tracks managed in your database. This includes both local tracks and tracks contributed by favorites on streaming services. The database holds data for all of them…
BTW, Roon support asked you to upload your database in a compressed format… if you wish to comply, you should zip the whole database folder, and upload one compressed file (which will certainly be quite under 4G)…
You want to look at Roon’s home screen to find the total of tracks managed in your database.
Home screen says 9391 tracks in 857 albums. That is tiny. Should be lightning fast.
BTW, Roon support asked you to upload your database in a compressed format…
if you wish to comply, you should zip the whole database folder, and upload one
compressed file (which will certainly be quite under 4G)…
Of course I “wish to comply”. I was merely querying if this was really what they wanted under the circumstances. It just took a while to do.
And it is NOT much under 4GB… even zipped it is 3.4GB.
1.4GB of it is JPG images stashed in 17,183 files in 90,434 folders !!!
Jeez… keep the hash index in RAM not in directory names. That IS bonkers. This is no way to use a filesystem. What a massive waste of disc space and access time!
I cannot see how it makes sense to upload this but sure… I wish to “comply” (though I would prefer to say that I wish to help).
Uploading now.
I honestly cannot see any good reason to install roon on my NAS. The NAS has a lot less CPU oomph for DSP and multiple streams and from what Roon say the server will not make use of the extra memory in any case.
The Roon-dedicated Intel i5 NUC should do just fine.
Well the problem seemed to go away with the update to 2.0 build 1388.
Memory use, even after running for a week, didn’t get much over 1.2GB and performance seems fairly consistent now.
And a further update to build 1392 just happened since then so all has restarted.
