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
· Yes, rebooting helps, but the issue returns after some time
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 don't know how to do this
What is the operating system of your Roon Server host machine?
· Nucleus
Which model Nucleus do you have?
· Nucleus One
Timestamp of issue occurrences
· Slowness on March 24, 2025 at 10:30 AM pacific time
Describe the issue
I recently purchased a Nucleus One and transferred my library from a 2016 MacBook Pro. I was having some slowness issues, therefore the reason to purchase a Nucleus. Performance is actually worse now. Some songs take up to 30+ seconds to load and play. Overall performance is really slow, like when recalling bookmarks. It's unusable at this point. I might have to move everything back over to my old laptop just to be able to use Roon and listen to music. Help is greatly needed/appreciated.
Describe your network setup
Xfinity Internet. Download speeds up to 800 Mbps. Netgear Nighthawk RAX70 router.
I have enabled diagnostics for your Nucleus and what this does is upload a log set to our servers for review. Looking over the timestamp you mentioned, I see that Roon displays a “poor connection” warning right around then, meaning that the network speed is too low for playback.
How is the Nucleus connected to the router, directly via Ethernet to one of the ports, or though a switch/range extender?
Are you by any chance using “Comcast Constant Guard”? This setting has caused some issues in the past with Roon:
Nucleus is connected directly via Ethernet to one of the ports on the router.
I don’t think I’m using Constant Guard… I’ll check.
Performance has been better over the last 24 hours. Still a little sluggish but not nearly as bad as it was. Would tags have anything to do with it? I deleted a tag that was applied to around 25,000 individual songs.
Regarding the poor network connection… I was checking my speeds when the slowness was occurring and I wasn’t getting slow readings. But maybe it’s more than just download speeds? My router is a few years old at this point. Could it just be time to upgrade that?
Thanks for sharing this information - we do have an active investigation ticket in with our development team around tags applied to large file counts, we’ll include your information here.
It certainly wouldn’t hurt! If you’d like to share another fresh timestamp (date,time, name of track playing) when you experience another dip in performance, we’ll take another look at a diagnostic report.
Do you see this dip in performance no matter the remote device you use? Or,is it only on the Macbook Pro?
It’s generally sluggish all the time, but it was especially so again this morning: 3/26, 9:10 AM. Everything I was doing was just taking a long time: adding an album to my library from Tidal, selecting/loading a different album (Tidal), and then playing that album. Those three actions took upwards of 3 - 5 minutes.
Device I’m using for the remote doesn’t seem to matter, although iOS devices seem to be most susceptible (although that could just be that I mostly use iOS devices as my remote).
Currently (3/26, 9:24 AM), songs are playing fine but navigating around is slow going (selecting an album or artist to view… I get the “Loading artist”, “Loading album”… takes around a minute to load)
We saw some errors and slowness in relation to fetching images from your remote devices, I’d be curious to test to see if changing your DNS server may help speed things up for you.
We have seen users have a better experience in the past if they change their Router’s DNS servers from the ISP provided ones to Cloudflare DNS, Quad9 or Google DNS. Can you please give this a try and let me know if it helps?
Thanks @Benjamin. I changed my router’s DNS yesterday afternoon and it seemed to help for a bit but experienced slowness last night (3/27 starting around 9:11 PM). It was a bit better later. The slowness seems to be sporadic. Sometimes performance is ok, sometimes it’s a little slow and sometimes it’s really slow.
Thanks for the update! What are the current DNS settings on your Nucleus? Feel free to share a screenshot of the webUI if possible - here’s more info on how to access it:
It may be good to test out changing the specific DNS server from your Nucleus as well here’s how:
Access your Nucleus web administration interface
Change the DNS Settings:
Scroll down to the Networking section.
If the Nucleus is using DHCP:
Note that you cannot directly edit DNS settings under DHCP. You will need to switch to a static IP to specify custom DNS servers.
Switch to a Static IP:
Click on the Configure or Edit option under networking.
Enter the current network settings for your Nucleus (IP address, subnet mask, gateway) manually. These can often be found in your router’s settings or your current DHCP lease information.
Specify Custom DNS Servers:
Add DNS servers in the relevant fields. Common choices:
Google DNS: 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4
Cloudflare DNS: 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1
OpenDNS: 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220
Save and Apply Changes:
Click Save or Apply to confirm your new settings.
Restart the Nucleus (make sure Roon Server is stopped) and let me know if you continue to experience stoppages when streaming
I changed the DNS setting on the Nucleus, using Google DNS a few days ago. Over the last few days, performance has been OK, I’d say. Still a bit sluggish overall with random periods of it being slower… this morning (4/8/25, 10:15sh), I experienced long load times when navigating to view Artists or Records (with/without tags applied). This was while music was playing. No delays there.
Any other help is appreciated.
Thanks for letting us know that the DNS change helped a bit. Can you please confirm, is there anything else interesting about your library, do you have quite a large amount of albums from one/few particular artists? Do you have any more tags associated with 10,000+ tracks/albums? I am looking over the latest diagnostics package for your Roon Server and I notice a lot of library activity. Also, if you have not done so yet, please try to turn Off or set to Throttled Background and On-Demand Audio Analysis under Roon Settings → Library.
Here is what my tagging system looks like at a glance. I’d say most of my tags are assigned to albums, except the “star” tags.
And yeah, I’ve already turned off the background and on-demand audio analysis. That was one of the first things I tried.
The only thing that seems to help at this point is to restart the Roon Server Software (I’ve restarted it maybe 5-10 times since opening this thread). That helps performance for maybe a couple of days (3-4 at the most) and then it seems to get clogged up again. Performance last night (4/13) and this morning (4/14, 8:45 am) has been especially slow again.
