I have for a while now been experiencing slow browsing and slow searching and I would really appreciate some help in bug tracking as it is ruining my enjoyment of the otherwise great software.
I have identified 4 symptoms which may be the same or different issues:
The first is that when I navigate around the user interface and view differerent artists or albums the time it takes to load the album or artist varies drammatically. For example, it could be instantaneous or it could take 30 seconds. It doesn’t appear to matter if I have just looked at the album (clicking the same album again sometimes takes 30 secs, some times instant). It is really annoying and kills the experience for me as navigating around the collection takes forever. I should say that I tested this with the task manager of the windows server I have roon server installed on open to see if high CPU use/mem use correlated with the lengthy waits - it didn’t Also, Roon was not doing any background processing at the time.
The second is that I appear to have about 1000 tracks that repeatedly appear in the library maintenance dialogue. I then trigger the library to be cleaned up and then they come back a day or so later. No idea whether the two are related.
The third is when browsing the history, I regularly get long periods where big chunks of the history is not available and the Roon spinner appears. If I leave the history and come back, sometimes the same thing happens but sometimes the list loads immediately. It’s almost like Roon ‘pauses’ and needs to be given a nudge to get going.
I am using latest versions of all software and I have roon server running on a decent power Dell server with 64GB RAM so I would expect it to fly. I have upgraded from a desktop machine to see if more power helps and it doesn’t change anything. I have a ipad pro so I assume that ipad power isn’t the problem.
Hey @crom – we can definitely take a deeper look here. How big is the library? Where is it stored?
64gb of RAM is more than Roon will need, but arguably the most important factor for Roon is where the database is stored. If you’re running the app of a spinning disk (meaning the system hard drive is not an SSD), that will definitely affect Roon’s performance as well.
Let me know a few more details and we’ll get this resolved. Thanks!
I have about 13,000 albums in my library across almost 3000 artists. The Database folder in the default installation folder > Users > … > RoonServer and is about 9GB.
The OS, Roon and DB are all installed on the same drive which is a one year old SSD - 256GB capacity of which 182GB is free.
If it would help I can take some video of the ipad showing the pauses and the inconsistencies of the search and page load times?
Can you describe in details what are the specs of your Dell machine where core is running ?
Can you also describe your network setup?
What else is running on that Dell machine: antivirus, backup, torrents, any other audio/video servers, maybe home security service etc.?
As for 1000 tracks which reappears regularly, mayby you are seeing TIDAL tracks. They can appear in Clean up library in case of logging out/ disabling the account.
[quote=“crom, post:1, topic:11102”]
The first is that when I navigate around the user interface and view differerent artists or albums the time it takes to load the album or artist varies drammatically. For example, it could be instantaneous or it could take 30 seconds.
If it would help I can take some video of the ipad showing the pauses and the inconsistencies of the search and page load times?[/quote]
Sorry @mike and @vova for jumping in here, but I wonder if @Crom is ONLY seeing these issues when Browsing etc on his iPad??
I wonder if Crom sees the same timing inconsistencies when viewing Roon on the Dell Server itself??..obviously 256Gb SSD and 64Gb Ram should give a good experience unless there is something serious [i.e. non-Roon] going on in the background
If Roon operates as expected on the Dell…then the problem may well have to do with Wifi at the iPad end…and there have been some reported issues with some of the recent V9.xxx versions of iOS
Worth Crom trying Roon on the Server to see how responsive it is [assuming his comments above don’t refer to using Roon browsing on the Dell itself of course]
Not at all Ronnie - thanks for your thoughts and I will investigate. Not sure whether I can have roon server AND roon front end running on same box without re-installing but I’ll see. Failing that I can install the front end on a hard-wired PC and run some tests. I hadn’t thought of wifi being the issue as we have no other wifi issues to speak about - but it’s good to remove these potentials from the equation. Thanks.
vova, thanks for helping. The specs are as follows:
Dell server is an R805 Dual Opteron CPU 8 core with 64GB RAM. Spec is here:
The only hardware element that is non-stock is the hard drive. I replaced SAS drive with SATA as the original SAS drives were only 70GB and I wanted a little more room.
The server is designed for virtualisation - lots of processing power - but in this instance it has a vanilla Server 2012 R2 install on it. Roon was the first (and only) piece of software that I have installed on it. I’ll see if I can paste a processes list in:
Dell R805 > Netgear GSM7352S > Asus wireless access point (ipad etc)
NAS box (audio files) > > Netgear GS716T > Audio PC
In case the above ‘plan’ gets messed up the Netgear GSM is in the server room with server, nas boxes etc. This is then connected to another netgear switch which feeds various things in the house including the audio PC.
I’ll look into the logs re the 1000 tracks and get back to you.
Hi Crom
Just download the Roon app from the Download section and install it on the Dell…the two Apps can run side by side
Can I take it from your answer then, that your “Slow Browsing” comments ONLY apply to using your iPad Pro to browse??..as you haven’t tried Roon browsing on the Dell as yet??
Using the Roon client on a hard wired PC to the same switch as the Roon server would also be a good test to see if the Server is performing as expected
Hi Ronnie, I haven’t tested it yet, primarily because I don’t expect networking to be an issue. I am also assuming that I will run into the whole openGL issue (the box being a server). I will give it a go though.
My slow browsing comments relate to both wireless and wired network, although, being honest, I haven’t done much wired network browsing recently but historically the problem. I will test and get back.
OK, I installed the app on the server and I did run into the openGL issue - so that’s a no go. Incidentally, one piece of feedback for the devs. When uninstalling I am asked whether or not I would like to uninstall the settings and databases. I didn’t know whether this meant my server databases or some other database - so I left it alone. IMO, it would be helpful to make this more explicit if they are separate, or put a stronger warning, if they are the same.
As an aside, the Opteron used in that Dell series is an old Core2Duo era processor. A lot of the cpu intensive tasks, like music analysis, can only use 1 core at a time, a faster processor makes a huge difference. If you have yet to analyze your music library it can take many many days for analysis to finish. You can test if analysis is the cause of the slowness by going under setting and setting ON-Demand Analysis Speed to OFF. This will stop all background processing and Roon will only do analysis when a track is queued up for play if it has not previously been analyzed.
My browsing is also slower in the build 142. when I select an album a local one it takes about 5-6 seconds to show it and a furterh 5-6 seconds when pressing play before it starts palying…
And I get frequent “Error loading Page please check your network connection.” errors both on wired windows Roon remote and wireless iPad 2 app.
I run Linux Roon Core on a Haswell i5 NUC with 8GB ram and SSD drive wired connection and RPI 2 as and endpoint also wired. I have 14K albums.
The strange thing is that in older versions response was much faster.
I thought it might be helpful to post a quick update to this. Apologies for the huge gap…addition to family got in the way of important hobbies!!
Since my original post I have tried a number of things to solve the problem with a little success:
I moved the roon server installation from the Dell server mentioned above to a desktop PC with 24GB RAM and an Intel Xeon E3-1265 CPU running at 2.5G. The PC stays on 24/7 as it also performs TV duties. Performance was similarly disappointing - really slow searches, long artist loading times and long album loading times. I was busy for a few weeks and put up with the problem. I then decided to upgrade the storage from SSD to Samsung 950 PRO 256GB M.2 PCIe 3.0 NVMe. This didn’t do much sadly and surprisingly. Then I returned and had a look at memory/cpu usage:
I’m not hugely conversant with Linux but the memory usage looks strangely high and the CPU usage oscillated between 100% and 200% constantly. Roon’s interface did not show any spinner so I had no idea that any sort of analysis was going on but presumably it was. I tried to change some of the settings and I de-activated the background audio analysis. After about 10 minutes, CPU speed dropped to below 1% and remained low.
The result: Browsing sped up enormously as did history loading - albums load in milli seconds and history extremely fast 0.1-2secs. Search remains slow at anywhere between 7 secs (rarely) to 14 secs (mostly) to 30 secs (rarely). Additionally, predictive search is a useless drain of resources for me because I’ve finished typing the search before any options appear (although I can see the CPU % kick into action as I start typing). Incidentally, speed is the same across wired and wireless connections and across ipad and macbook (I can test on win 10 if useful).
@mike Bearing in mind that this PC has now been running constantly for months and there is no spinner in the UI, could it be that the size of my music collection is causing these problems because it is taking so long to analyse, or perhaps regular housekeeping tasks take so long to complete that they never actually complete before they are due to run again?
I would love to finally resolve this and get search/predictive text working at a similar pace.
Hey @crom – I think 1.3 will help here. We’ve done some performance work over the last month, and larger collections on Linux should benefit quite a bit from that work.
Search performance and audio analysis have also received a good deal of attention, so I expect the issues you’re describing to improve once that release goes live. Definitely let me know if that’s not the case ok?
