Roon Slows Down Over Time, Core Server Reboot Temporarily Fixes Problem

Support
1

Core Machine (Operating system/System info/Roon build number)

Windows 7 Ultimate
Intel i5-6600 CPU @ 3.3GHz
16GB RAM
Roon 1.7 (Build 710) 64bit (Server Only)
Hardwired to Switch #1

Music files reside on a local 3.5" SATA HDD (Directly connected to motherboard)

The Core Machine is only used for Roon.

Network Details (Including networking gear model/manufacturer and if on WiFi/Ethernet)

Router: Google Nest Wifi AC2200
Router has a WAN port (cable modem), and a single uplink port which is connected to Switch #1

Switch #1: TP-Link TL-SG1024S 24-port Gigabit unmanaged (Roon Core is hardwired to this switch)

Switch #2: Netgear GS105 5-port Gigabit unmanaged (Switch #2 is hardwired to Switch #1)

Wifi: Google Nest Wifi AC2200 is (3) Wifi devices as a mesh network. The router and (2) access points communicate with one another wirelessly.

Audio Devices (Specify what device you’re using and its connection type - USB/HDMI/etc.)

D1 - MacBook Pro - Roon Remote 1.7 (Build 710) - Built-in Output - Hardwired to Switch #2
D2 - Windows 7 PC - Roon Bridge 1.7 (Build 571) - Soundcard, Toslink, WASAPI Exclusive Mode - Hardwired to Switch #1
D3 - Windows 10 PC - Roon Remote 1.7 (Build 710) - OS Mixer - Hardwired to Switch #2
D4 - Chromecast Audio #1 - Toslink - Wifi (Access Point)
D5 - Chromecast Audio #2 - Analog Out - Wifi (Access Point)
D6 - Chromecast (Gen. 1) - Display Only - Wifi (Router)
D7 - Apple TV (Gen. 2) - Airplay - Hardwired to Switch #1
D8 - Marantz SR7010 - Airplay - Wifi (Router)

Description Of Issue

Over time, the responsiveness of Roon decreases. The slow down presents itself as Overview page takes longer and longer to load. Searches take longer to complete. Music takes longer to start playback (both local files and Tidal streaming), and Roon Remote takes longer to connect to the Core. For example. Searches can go from taking 1-2 seconds to complete to 10-20 seconds. Starting playback goes from 0-1 second, to 10-20 seconds.

The slow down is on all Remote devices including D3 and D1 which are hardwired.

Restarting Roon Server temporally fixes the problem. Within 24 hours, Roon is annoyingly slow again and I restart Roon Server. I do not restart the computer, I just restart Roon Server and I am back zipping through Roon.

I am relatively new to Roon, having it installed for a little less than a month.

I also use my iPhone as a Roon Remote. Here are some screen recordings I took for illustrative purposes:
Roon Remote: Before Server Reboot
Roon Remote: After Roon Server Reboot

Core PC: Before Server Reboot

roon-server-running
roon-server-running827Ă—724 53.9 KB

Core PC: Roon Not Running

roon-server-off
roon-server-off830Ă—719 50.2 KB

Core PC: After Server Reboot

roon-after-restart
roon-after-restart826Ă—719 49.1 KB

Please help.

1 Like
2

Happens to me, too. My core is on a dedicated machine running Ubuntu Server. I observe an ever increasing memory usage until responsiveness obliges me to restart the Roon Server process. This I don’t do everyday, but once every 3-5 days. After restart, all is good again for some time.

3

I am sorry to hear you are experiencing similar slow downs. I just added some screen recordings and system screen shots to my original post above. With the amount of slow down I am dealing with, I could never go 3-5 days without going crazy. Thanks for weighing in here, hopefully Roon Support can help.

4

I have been monitoring my Roon Core server for quite a long time and believe that with the server on Linux there’s some memory leak. I have no experience with running Roon on Windows, though. Another thing to take into account is that Roon periodically performs metadata updates and image downloads, and if you use Tidal/Qobuz, your database must be synchronized with those services. Especially a full metadata update can have a noticeable impact on the Roon system performance, depending on how big your library is.

If you observe performance degradation in less than 24 hours, something other might be amiss. How big is your library, how many local or Tidal/Qobuz tracks do you have?

My core server runs on an i5-8600K with 16 GB RAM, the OS and Roon database on a NVME M.2 SSD. I have around 145.000 tracks and the system is running very well for a couple of days, until I perceive degrading performance and feel it must be restarted. In fact that doesn’t bother me much, as the Roon Sever restart could easily be automated.

5

My Local Library is 108,236 tracks.
My Tidal Library 457 tracks.

I really don’t want to go the route of an automated server restart. I am just getting my feet wet with Roon and if I can eliminate these slow downs, I am sure I’ll eventually build a NUC and run ROCK. If I can’t fix this slow down issue, I am weary of investing the money for sub-optimal performance.

I come from Foobar2000 as my primary playback software which has always “just worked”, and runs for months and months at a time without restarting. I love what Roon brings to the table in terms of functionality, but I am going to need some more stability to make it viable long term. - The measure of success is my wife being able to use it without me having to “fix it” constantly.

Thanks for your feedback, much appreciated.

2 Likes
6

I started out with Roon on a Windows 7 desktop and never had any issues with degraded performance, but I powered the machine down every night because it was in the Master Bedroom. I see a windows 10 pc in your information. Have you tried using that for the core machine?

Have the NUC/Rock server now and its always available. The only time I need to mess with it is for Roon upgrades.

7

I’ve been running Roon Core on Ubuntu Server, NUC and NUC-like boxes, for years. I only reboot them when installing Ubuntu updates. I never see any memory or CPU pressure. When I started, the music files (~25k tracks) where on a Synology NAS and some things were a bit sluggish. Now I use internal SATA SSDs for the local music, everything is fast and never bogs down.

8

Thanks for your feedback. The Windows 10 machine is used for many tasks including processor intensive tasks, and Roon suggests having a dedicated Core. If I shut it down every night that likely would help but I’m really after a hands off experience that “just works”. Cheers

9

OS is on an SSD. For the library I am using an internal SATA hard drive, spinning disk not solid state. With my library SSD would be very expensive.

Glad to hear you’ve had a smooth experience, hoping to get there too!

Thanks

10

How many tracks do you have on the SATA drive? Reason I’m asking is that Roon is built around an object-oriented database (OODB), and those are prone to memory fragmentation over time that increasingly forces garbage collections, making normal processing ever slower. It’s not an issue if the machine is configured generously for the size of the database as is with my modest library, but I’ve seen similar behavior with other OODBs in the (somewhat distant) past.

11

I would hope my system specs would be up to the task, I am not sure how the size compares to others in this community but I don’t think it’s outrageous. Thanks for the feedback, let me know if you think my system is under-powered.

12

I understand the hands off experience your looking for, and a lot of us have that with different machines and software setups.

I was thinking of the Win 10 vs Win 7 machines as a short term test to see if the issue also occurs on that platform.

Roon runs perfectly for a lot of folks and it is sad when someone doesn’t have the same experience. Just trying to help figure it out.

13

Hi Mike- To your point, a test wouldn’t hurt, I do appreciate the suggestion. Before I go down that path, hopefully there is a simpler troubleshooting step. If not, I would certainly consider it.

Cheers

14

Sorry, I had missed your library size higher up on the thread. I don’t know if your system is underpowered for your library size, that’s something the Roon folks would be able to estimate better. My current core (for a 5x smaller library):

8x Intel® Core™ i7-10510U CPU @ 1.80GHzCPU
16GB DDR4
4TB SATA SSD

15

My library is with 146.000 tracks a little bigger than Bryan’s, and my Core i5-8600K (6 cores @3.60GHz) with 16GB DDR4 and a NVMe SSD for OS and database does very well.

But I think all depends on the use you give your system. I almost always play to one zone only, don’t upsample nor use any DSP functions. But during these months of COVID restrictions I have been playing music mostly all day long. And I have saved many hundreds of albums in my library, and I have been exploring many more. I’d say that I interact heavily with the user interface… navigate from interpreter to interpreter, looking for alternative recordings of music I enjoy, etc. I notice that the user interface is less responsive every time Roon kicks off a metadata update process. Less so when images are being updated. And as I have said before, I notice an ever increasing memory usage along several days of interaction with the system, until searches and page loads become noticeably slower. E.g., starting Roon Server on my Ubuntu Server machine will give a total memory usage of about 2.8G (this is Roon and all other processes), and when it reaches about 6G, I’ll have to restart the Roon Server to bring back the accustomed responsiveness. This happens every 3-5 days of intense system use. Immediately after restarting Roon, the total memory usage falls back to 2.8G. I wonder if there are de-referenced objects which aren’t garbage-collected, or aren’t garbage-collected in an opportune time frame.

Maybe I just will have to let it go on and watch what happens. I have noticed, though, that sometimes overnight without usage of the system, memory usage goes down, but never back to the 2.8G.

16

… or they are GCed, but Mono does not do arena compacting so memory fragments. Back some decades ago I did quite a bit of work on GC, it’s surprising how many ways there are to screw up memory management…
Update: On a cursory read, Mono seems to do compaction https://www.mono-project.com/docs/advanced/garbage-collector/sgen/. But I don’t know how Mono allocation coexists with malloc/free. One failure mode I recall from back when is that malloc (for instance for file buffers) can create unmovable islands that prevent compacting the rest of the allocation space.

1 Like
18

Sorry for the trouble here, @Bryan_Nieman!

I’d like to have our team take a closer look at what’s going on during a specific instance. Here’s what I’m hoping you can do:

The next time you notice things are slow, reproduce the issues mentioned above. Please:

  • Perform a search, note the time the search is done, how long the search takes, and what you search for
  • Start playback of a local file and note how long it takes to start, the time you press play, and the track that you are trying to start

Once you’ve done this, please send us that information as well as logs from your install by using the directions found here and sending us over a set of logs using a shared Dropbox link.

We’ll take a look at these logs and hopefully get a better idea of what might be happening here.

Thanks!

2 Likes
19

Hi Dylan,

Thanks for reaching out. I saved the log from the examples I provided in my original post:

Roon Remote: Before Server Reboot
In this example I performed a search for “Funkadelic” at 12/23 10:05:52 and the search took 52 seconds to complete. Playback of the local FLAC file (16/44.1) took 2 seconds to start.

Roon Remote: After Roon Server Reboot

Please let me know where to send the dropbox link of my system logs, I would prefer not to post it in this public forum. In the meantime, I will send them to you as a private message.

Cheers

1 Like
20

Roon continues to slow down over time. It was annoying, but not terrible, the past couple of days but then today it went into a major slow down again.

Per your instructions, here is a test I performed:
Search: Nina Simone
Time to complete Search: 17 Seconds
Time for playback to Start: 20 seconds

After Roon Server Reboot
Search: Nina Simone
Time to complete Search: 1-2 Seconds
Time for playback to Start: 0 Seconds

I performed this test around 12/30/2020 @ 3:01PM Central Time
I will send a fresh set of logs via Private Message again.

Thanks

2 Likes
21

I experience exactly the same behavior, and is annoying. I hoped this was resolved with v1.8, but not. My server runs in a Qnap TVS-871. Only use local media. I would say that 10-20 seconds to start after pressing play (on any remote) is not good… After restarting the server it immediately works fast for a short period. I have around 155K tracks, but with 10K happens the same. I never use any DSP processing. I can’t believe that any streaming service is faster than using my local media. I really hope this issue is in the support roadmap.