I agree with you for commercial or industrial scale applications but I respectfully disagree with you for home or SOHO applications. I’m just not seeing why having a server running for the half a day that no one is using it is a good thing.
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I appreciate your suggested work around. I have implemented something similar but I’m still trying to understand what the difficulties are to implement the WoL? Some of the issues pointed out by @Danny have to do with putting the core to sleep and in my case Win10 handles that quite nicely. Win10 even prevents the NUC from going to sleep while serving multimedia. There was the issue of waking up endpoints and for me that is not an issue. As a general rule I would think that a best effort would be acceptable to most. The issue really come down to running Roon Core on a remote server.
This is not an end of the world issue, I’m just curious what the issues are. Roon seems to be such a well designed and capable piece of work that I might learn something if I could get some insight.
Thanks,
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What is your objective with turning the server off?
If it is power consumption. Windows is very good at low power idling.
I measured my NUC when idle, it was like a night light.
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Yes it is power consumption. Just to be clear, I don’t suggest that the server power off but rather go into sleep mode.
I’m not aware of an idle mode for windows, other than sleep.
Idle is not a mode like sleep.
It’s just that the OS and the hardware cooperate to reduce power when not needed, not just to the entire CPU, it can reduce power or even shut down power to a core, or to memory banks. And this happens very quickly all the time, a Core can be “parked” and then brought back in microseconds.
What this means is that the machine uses as little power as possible, moment by moment, depending on the workload. And it is not a mode that needs to be managed.
Again, look at the actual consumption when not in use.
Thank you Anders.
So your recommendation is to disable the Win10 sleep settings and just let the CPU/OS manage the power consumption?
Regards,
Yes.
I can show the exact settings when I get home.
You can search in the App Store (iOS) or other application marketplaces for “Wake On LAN” and that usually gives a handful of results. The hardest part is usually writing down the MAC address of the computer/device you’re trying to wake.
In my case, the Kodi app actually does wake on LAN but it’s a bit clunky and if I just want to use Roon, I have to use the Kodi app first which is silly.
I wish Roon would remember the MAC Address of the Roon server it’s connected to and just blindly try to wake the device on LAN when it tries to connect… that’d save me time. That probably ought to be an option somewhere as it’s potentially not desirable for everyone but eh…
Cheers!
Alex.
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Hi Anders, I have similar issue. Appreciate if you could share the settings for the Windows idle mode. I have Windows 10 PC, not a server. Thanks.
I forgot, sorry, and in the meantime I switched to a Roon Nucleus, and it doesn’t even have any power settings.
But that’s the point: for Windows, if you turn off hard sleep (which requires waking), the machine is already highly efficient. Microsoft and Intel have worked very hard to make that automatic. The customer managing sleep and hibernation is how we used to do it, less important today.
Sure, it is still possible, but in most cases not needed. I measured power consumption at one time, and when the machine wasn’t doing anything it was like a night light. Very minimal.
And especially if you use SSD instead of spinning disks. And a headless server without a monitor.
EDIT I just messured the consumption of my Nucleus, with its 2 TB SSD, when it is idle, and it was 14 W.
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I remember when 14W was a trivial load. I’m guiltier than most when it comes to phantom power as I leave my DAC, microRendu and X-SPDIF2 operating at all times. My preamp trickles standby power through capacitors and I have a power conditioner that’s always on.
I don’t even have solar panels (apartment) that might shift this phantom load from the grid.
I usually power down my server at night and manually turn it on when I want to listen to music.
Like littering, these loads are trivial individually, but when you look at phantom loads nationally or globally, they are a big thing amounting to whole power stations worth of energy. A smart grid is the answer. If our House could learn when we used appliances and turned phantom power on or off to keep them available only when needed that would be great. I think we are on the cusp of this happening, but at the moment the human has all the learning curve in order to integrate everything.
True. But at least computers are improving, where other things are not.
When I was going to measure the load of the Nucleus I kept turning things off and watching the load. I found that my “other” headphone amp, which I no longer use but had accidentally left on, was drawing many times more than the Nucleus.
Computer power consumption has been a major focus since the turn of the century. I remember a meeting with some silicon execs, discussing the merits of different processor architectures, and the main measure of goodness was “megaHertz per milliwatt”. And many of the improvements are fully automatic, like slowing down or turning off cores or memory banks when they are not needed. And “not needed” doesnt just mean at night, it means between keystrokes, or faster than that. Last I saw, a few years ago, turning a core off and turning it back on took 23 microseconds.
I’m not suggesting we should ignore computer phantom loads. But at least this is improving, other things are not.
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Are you analyzing? I ask because I did my N+ and it was at 10W idle.
No, analysis should be completed.
Could be the accuracy of the measurement.
Or that a few other things were still plugged in, a switch and some other stuff.
I quit when I saw a night light level number.
Your measurement is more trustworthy.
I don’t get it. Does ROCK on the Intel NUCs nowadays support Standby or Sleep when not playing music for some time? If not, how fast does it boot, when I use the power button to shutdown and reboot the system everyday?
No sleep or standby.
These are numbers when the machine is sitting there doing nothing. Idle.
How fast does it boot? I don’t know, I booted it in 2016, haven’t touched it since.
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So you leave the machine running the whole day? As I’m informed right an actual NUC consumes 10 Watts for doing nothing but waiting. Even the 6 Watts of an Mac mini is a lot for just waiting for the use come back home. 
RoonCore on an iPad would be great.
It really wouldn’t for a number of reasons:
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The Core works best when connected by Ethernet, whereas iPads are designed to float in WiFi. Once you start thinking about multiple zones, DSP, convolution etc then WiFI becomes a problematic bottleneck;
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The Core likes to have the Roon database in onboard fast storage (SSD). This would take up a lot of the iPad available storage;
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The Core recommended requirements are an i3 processor equivalent. While the iPad Pro A9X is roughly equivalent to a 2013 i5, the chips in lower spec iPads wouldn’t handle a Core very well at all;
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The iOS is not designed as a server operating system and it is doubtful a Core could operate within Apple’s constraints on what iOS apps can and can’t do.
Currently, the best place for your Core is in a dedicated NUC or similar device. If you run a general operating system (not ROCK) then you can setup power management through the operating system and WOL to turn on the server from an iPad app.
Thanks for the explanation. I know the iPad does not serve well for the use case of most Roon users. It was more a joke. In my case I mostly need the Server capabilities of Roon to have good Music Discovery on the iPad Pro as a replacement of all the bad music Apps for iOS. The iPad is the Perfect listening device for me. I can take it everywhere and sending audio via WiFi shouldn’t be a problem when I don’t listen to hires or lossless music and don’t use convolution or DSP stuff. If I could run and manage my music completely on the iPad as my central music host it would be a dream. At the moment I’ve 350 Gig Music that would fit well an the Pro. I prefer as less devices as possible. To my ears the audio output of the iPad is great and I hear no difference to a DragonFly Black. And keeping a second computer running for listening on an iPad seems like overkill for me, but I haven’t found good music players for iOS. Playing around with Roon was just fun and now I can’t live without the experience.
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Wrt power consumption: yes, the small parasitic losses add up, but I think of 10W in the context of my overall footprint. I want to focus on the big waste, not just on Roon because it is in front of my mind. I have many other bigger issues; I live in an old, poorly insulated house, for example.
And a single flight to Europe to visit my mother is equal to 200 years of Roon.
So yes, I think we have brought computers to a level of efficiency that they don’t keep me awake at night.
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