Slowness while using Roon through a VPN over cellular

When away from home I’m using Roon through a Softether VPN connection on my iPhone which is connected to Verizon cellular while traveling in my car. Every now and then it stops playing a track after it’s been playing, and a message pops up stating Tidal is slow, or a file is loading slowly. Then it skips to another song, and starts playing again. I have a resync delay set to 500ms, but I’m wondering if there are any buffer settings I can enable to eliminate this problem. I don’t see any. I would think the bottleneck is most likely the cellular service, and I’m hoping there’s a setting I’m not aware of that would allow Roon to cache enough of a track to eliminate this issue. A Speedtest on my phone while connected to LTE with a signal strength of two bars is 28.2 Dowload, and 2.50 Upload. This would vary depending on the signal strength.

My hardware for this scenario is as follows:

Core: ROCK on * 10th Generation Intel Core i7-10710U (NUC10i7FNH1) with Intel UHD Graphics 300 MHz – 1 15 GHz. RAM is 8GB. Connected to directly to router by ethernet cable with a static IP.

Router: FIOS Quantum Gateway with 1GB Down, and 1GB Up.

Softether VPN server running on Windows 10 pc with an i5 3.20GHz CPU, 20GB RAM, and 1GB ethernet connection connected to the FIOS router with a static IP.

Endpoint: iPhone 12 Pro with iOS 15.6. The problem occurs more often on 5G, so I’m using Verizon’s LTE.

All software is updated to latest versions.

Thanks

Cellular services often have very high latency which may explain the issues you are experiencing. We are on cellular internet at home and latency is highly variable, and can often be in the thousands of milliseconds. Using a VPN may also compound this - I occasionally use a VPN for streaming stuff from the UK and it can be very flaky indeed. I’m not aware of any Roon setting that would change this.

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Hello there, your SoftEtherVPNserver setup looked similar to mine in the beginnings (5 years ago, and running PC windows-8) with identical issues … a tech guy advised me to switch over to A RaspberryPi3 the PiOS - and indeed, it works like a charm! just changed a year ago to RaspberryPi4 with 64bits PiOS. Butting both cases no stuttering or whatsoever using 3G/4G hope it helps?

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Great! Thanks Max. I’ll give that a shot.

I created a step by step tutorial specific for the RPi 3 and 4 (SOFTETHERVPN server) availability via Dropbox. If interested sent your email regards, Max