Roon has run reliably for years from an old i5 Mac Mini. I recently migrated to an M1 Mac Mini, using the migration route you document. Roon server is now spectacularly unreliable: it vanished altogether from the network, drops out and loses sight of all audio devices several times a day.
It really is quite ludicrous that, more than a year after the launch of the M1 architecture, you have yet to release a native app for the platform.
I’m deeply disappointed in what is an expensive piece of software, that now appears entirely unsupported on a key platform.
The reason it’s not running native has been documented already. Roon relies on Microsoft .net infrastructure which has only recently been release to run on m1 hardware, they are working on it now and when .net is likely more stable on the platform it will be released as first releases are seldom stable on new platforms.
Thanks - I hadn’t realised that Roon used .net - I’d figured that whatever they were using wasn’t playing nicely with M1. If I were them I’d be prioritising a migration to a modern framework though.
Their use of .net explains pretty much every issue I’ve seen with Roon - it’s the most abominable lash-up, and one that no dev house who aren’t constrained by corporate stupidity or market prescription will choose to use.
This machine came with Monterey - would be reluctant to go through the faff of reverting it to Big Sur - might just have to grit my teeth until Roon gets it’s act together. 8GB will be zero issue because of the unified memory model of the ARM/Apple platform - compared to discrete architectures, it effectively multiplies real memory, even before it starts swapping.
Yes and no. If you have a relatively small library, you’ll be fine with 8GB, providing you’re not doing much else on the mini. But for a larger library - I have around 190k tracks - and if you also use the computer for things other than Roon, 8GB is probably insufficient. At the moment Roon Server is using 4GB RAM on my Mac mini, but it’s not long since I rebooted. It will creep up to around 6GB over the next few days, at which point I’ll probably restart Roon Server. Bottom line, I couldn’t run Roon with only 8GB given that I also use my mini for other tasks.
Quite possibly. In my experience there seem to be quite a few memory leaks with Monterey. I can confirm the Finder leak you linked, which isn’t too serious as you can relaunch Finder to free up the memory, but I’m also having problems with WindowServer (currently at 1.5GB and climbing). At some point I guess Apple will sort this out, but it’s disappointing that we’re at 12.2 and still having issues that have been around since Monterey was launched.
I haven’t been tracking memory usage on the Mini, but my M1 MacBook Pro Max is proving completely stable (12.2). That said, Window Server is currently sitting at 2.66GB, which seems (a lot) on the high side.
Edit: Window server malloc seems to be scaling up and down OK - the biggest culprits appear to be Adobe Applications (as ever).
I really don’t know enough about Mac OS memory allocation to say this with any authority, but it does seem as though there are a number of apps and processes that aren’t as efficient as they should be.
you dont have to revert it to BigSur just add a partition and install on that new partition, save a backup database in users/shared on Monterey and then when BS is up and booted you can either do a user migration or just load up roon server/core and restore your backup.
Like I said - haven’t got time to waste playing with a problem that Roon doesn’t seem to want to do anything about. They don’t even seem to have a proper support system - you know, the one where you raise a ticket and they answer…
Quite so. In particular, anything from either Adobe or Microsoft is going to be egregious bloatware that hogs system resources. Stuff that uses proper frameworks and IDEs works just fine, and fits an 8GB limit fine, unless you’re going ballistic.
Despite the memory leak error, my M1 (8GB) with Roon on Monterey works without the problems you described (my core and two endpoints are connected via LAN and one endpoint via WLAN using a FRITZ!Box as router, small Library with 15k tracks).
So I am wondering if it is Roon only or if you have any other underlying general network issues, maybe based in Monterey rather than Roon? No reproach, just a question?
Interesting that you’re not seeing the issue - I’m reasonably (never 100%!) sure that the network is OK: everything is wired - Cat6a premises cabling throughout - via an enterprise grade managed switch (that isn’t showing any packet loss on the port), with the servers in a dedicated server cabinet. Still investigating from this end, but am about to zap the Roon install and try a clean install, to see if there’s been an issue in the migration from my old machine. There seem to be enough people reporting near exactly similar issues that Roon’s silence on the matter is incomprehensible.
I seemed to be quite lucky, also my remote on iPad and iPhone does not crash that often, as it is reported here.
Support from Roon is a difficult topic, I agree with you that they are very often way to quite, but as you can see problems are many and can be complex.
Good point, but a) I’m running a pretty vanilla configuration (don’t even have QoS switched on) and b) I haven’t changed the switch configuration since long before I changed servers. Everything I’m seeing suggests software issues.