What kind of performance/speed issue are you experiencing?
· The app takes a long time to respond to commands
Please try to reboot your Roon Server
· No, the issue is still the same even immediately after a reboot
Please try to reboot your networking gear (Router/Switches/etc.)
· No, the issue is still the same even after a reboot
Is there any change in behavior if you try to navigate to Roon Settings -> Library and set both Background and On-Demand Audio Analysis to Throttled or Off?
· No, the issue is still the same
Does the issue happen on multiple Roon Remotes (controllers) or just one?
· Issue happens on multiple remotes
Router Domain Name System (DNS) change
· I was able to change my router's DNS servers but it did not help
What is the operating system of your Roon Server host machine?
· Roon Optimized Core Kit (ROCK)
Timestamp of issue occurrences
· All the time
Describe the issue
My Roon is also very sluggish lately. Scrolling through albums takes (on startup->lafter it’s a bit faster) up to 20 seconds before covers become visible. Playback is not immediate and sometimes music stops in the middle of a song. First thought it was my WiFi, bought an Aimesh (Asus), wifi signal improving significantly but Roon still slow. Database reset, cleaned my NUC8i5BEH (64Gb ram) , put new cooling paste on it, but slowness did not stop. Downloadspeed on WiFi is 400mb/s. Slowness on Android Pixel 9pro xl and MacBook air (2026): no difference. Further setup: Ziggo modem, Asus ZenWifi pro xt12 router, ZenWifi 8 aimesh (wifi connected) and Lyngdorf Tdai-3400 endpoint. 3500 albums in library of which 550 albums on internal ssd (NUC).
Describe your network setup
Ziggo Smart Modem--Asus Zenwifi xt12pro(router)--Lyngdorf TDAI-3400 (--=wired) Zenwifi XT8 AiMesh point and iPhone/Pixel 9 proXL/MacbookAir 26 as endpoints via Wifi. Downloadspeed on XT12 and XT8 a little under or on 400Mb/s.
**4-7-2026:** I read other comments about sluggish behaviour on Roon. What helped for now was resetting Roon server again (did that already a few times before) but now also disconnecting Tidal and reconnect. For now it's fast and snappy. If it stays this way, I will close the ticket as solved....
I went through the RoonServer logs, RAAT logs, and system diagnostics in detail and found a clear root cause. Posting the full picture here in case it helps others with similar symptoms.
Your storage setup (from system_info.txt):
Internal SSD in the NUC - ~550 albums
Samsung Portable SSD T7 (USB, exFAT) - bulk of your library
Seagate “Fast SSD” (USB, exFAT) - appears to be your Roon Backup target
What the logs show:
Both external SSDs show “Volume was not properly unmounted. Some data may be corrupt. Please run fsck.” at every boot. This means they’re being disconnected uncleanly rather than safely ejected - a red flag for USB connection reliability and/or filesystem health. The Seagate drive was even found mounted twice simultaneously at two different paths - a classic sign of a drive dropping off and being redetected as “new” without the stale mount clearing.
A confirmed real USB disconnect/reconnect happened on your T7 SSD on June 30 at 20:15, immediately followed by a Roon Server socket exception (“Connection reset by peer”).
Latest session logs show the actual mechanism behind the freezes. At 10:14:35 and 10:20:57, Roon logged two [library] endmutation events lasting 97.6 seconds and 358 seconds (nearly 6 minutes). During that window, your library’s reported size collapsed from the normal 3,222 albums/40,248 tracks down to just 482 albums/5,475 tracks - almost exactly matching the size of your internal-only content - before rebuilding back to the full count 6 minutes later. In other words: the content from your external SSD(s) briefly became unreadable to Roon, which then had to rebuild nearly the entire database. The whole server is single-threaded on this operation - it freezes for everyone, on every remote, for however long that rebuild takes.
This is not a one-off. The same pattern (library size collapsing, multi-second-to-multi-minute mutation stalls) shows up in the vast majority of your rotated log files - 92 stalls of 10+ seconds across the day. This matches “happens all the time.”
Two minutes before the worst episode, your Core’s own wired Ethernet port (eth0) flapped up/down 6 times in 90 seconds (10:11:08-10:12:37), alongside a burst of “No route to host” errors reaching Roon’s/Tidal’s servers. This is on the Core’s own wired connection - separate from the Wi-Fi you already upgraded - and may be a contributing/parallel issue rather than the direct cause of the storage hiccup.
Ruled out: memory is not leaking (stable ~6.7GB out of your 64GB RAM over the whole session) and isn’t the bottleneck; CPU/thermal is fine; this confirms none of the settings you already tried (Wi-Fi mesh, DNS, audio analysis throttling, reboots) could have fixed it, because the actual bottleneck is storage reliability on the Core, not network or app settings.
Next steps to try, in priority order:
Test both external SSDs on a full PC/Mac, not through ROCK: disconnect the Samsung T7 and Seagate drive, plug them into a Windows/Mac machine, and run Samsung Magician (for the T7) and Seagate SeaTools (for the Seagate) to check drive health. We tried pulling SMART data directly via SSH on ROCK, but the bridge chip in these drives doesn’t support the standard SAT/NVMe passthrough commands smartctl needs - so the manufacturer tools are the only reliable path here.
Try different USB cables and ports on the NUC for both drives - ideally not sharing the same internal USB hub/root port, since both drives showed signs of unclean disconnects.
Check if the drives are adequately powered - both are bus-powered; try running them one at a time to see if instability continues, which would point to a shared power/bandwidth issue.
Run fsck on both exFAT volumes (or reformat after backing up), since exFAT isn’t journaled and Roon/ROCK won’t auto-repair the “not properly unmounted” state.
Swap the Ethernet cable/port between the NUC and your switch/router, given the eth0 flapping we found - this is independent of the Wi-Fi work you already did.
If the manufacturer tools come back clean on both drives, that points to cable/port/power rather than drive degradation
Wow, thank you @vadim for this extensive analysis. After taking all the steps, I decided to remove the Seagate as a backup, since it is the oldest SSD of the two and there is no tool available for Mac to check the drive. I did a Magician check on the T7 and that was good on all topics. I will keep an eye on it and for now thank you very much again for the support!
Removing the Seagate was a reasonable call - with it out of the picture, the T7 now has the USB bus and its power budget to itself, which directly addresses the shared hub/power concern from our analysis. And a clean bill of health from Samsung Magician is good news for the drive itself.
Two small things worth doing at your convenience to keep it that way:
Since the T7's exFAT volume was flagged as "not properly unmounted" in the logs, running a file system check on it (First Aid in Disk Utility on your Mac) would clear that lingering state - exFAT isn't journaled, so it won't repair itself.
If you get a chance, swapping the Ethernet cable between the NUC and your router is still worthwhile, given the port flapping we saw - it's independent of everything else and takes a minute.
If the slowness returns, just reply here within the next few days or open a new ticket referencing this one, and we'll pick it up right away with fresh diagnostics.
Thanks, @vadim, I will check and repair the T7. Also changed the two cat5 cables on my modem + router for cat6’s. The Seagate is replaced by an extra Dropbox backup.
What kind of performance/speed issue are you experiencing?
· The app takes a long time to respond to commands
Please try to reboot your Roon Server
· No, the issue is still the same even immediately after a reboot
Please try to reboot your networking gear (Router/Switches/etc.)
· No, the issue is still the same even after a reboot
Is there any change in behavior if you try to navigate to Roon Settings -> Library and set both Background and On-Demand Audio Analysis to Throttled or Off?
· No, the issue is still the same
Does the issue happen on multiple Roon Remotes (controllers) or just one?
· Issue happens on multiple remotes
Router Domain Name System (DNS) change
· I was able to change my router's DNS servers but it did not help
What is the operating system of your Roon Server host machine?
· Roon Optimized Core Kit (ROCK)
Timestamp of issue occurrences
· Today, yesterday and a few minutes ago
Describe the issue
I would like to re-open this issue: https://community.roonlabs.com/t/roon-slow-performance-after-network-and-hardware-optimizations-ref-mnhfxs/322144 . I am experiencing slow loading/playback of albums again.
Last time the solution was to disconnect Tidal by removing it totally and reconnecting it again. Haven’t done that now for diagnostic reasons.
18/7: adding another (new) issue. Music playback has dropouts (2-3 per day). This didn’t happen before the last version. Did a reset of the Roon Server at 15.45h local time. Now everything seems snappy/fast again.
