Speed problem with 1.6

Roon Software Discussion
1

I have seen that search is slow, about 5 seconds before anything shows up, even the artist name (artists I have in the library). I just testedright now, with Miles Davis, and it took 15 seconds 7til anything showed up.

But I found another strange effect. I selected an album, by just clicking in the album browser (Blue Maqams by Anouar Brahem). I have one version, a 96k FLAC. But in addition, Tidal has a 16/44 and an MQA, and Qobuz has a 16/44 and a 24/96, neither of which is in my library. When I opened the album, it appeared immediately, but there was a spinner on the Versions tab. I hit Play. Nothing happened, for about five seconds, until the spinner finished, then it started playing.

Happened with other albums, some local, some streamed.
In that case, I had nothing playing.
When I already had something, the precise sequence was,
Display shows the new album
Versions spinner is go8ng, no versions shown
The music keeps playing
After about 1 second, the icon in the Now Playing bar changes to the new album, no ther change
3 seconds more, the Versions spinner stops and versions appear
1-2 seconds more, music starts and the progress bar moves

Configuration: Nucleus, internal SSD, gigabit WiFi and gigabit Ethernet (tests show speeds around 750), playing to Meridian 818/8000, DSP convolution,

The final play delay is pretty normal, probably the 131k convolution. But the wait for the Versions spinner is new. I assume this is checking up with Tidal and Qobuz. There is caching, going back to Blue Maqams eliminated the spinner delay.

Tested with another zone, the final play startup is quicker, could be a Meridian thing, or no convolution. But the spinner delay is still there.

Everything is slightly faster now, both the spinner and search, finding Dave Holland took 5 seconds.

But overall it’s not a happy situation.

2

Just did the same test.
Much better results, but in an intriguing way.
The Miles Davis search took a few seconds.
But opening an album and hitting play: it’s not just much faster (one second), but the Versions tab is no longer serialized.
The spinner goes away and “Versions” appears immediately, and then the Tidal and Qobuz logos appear. That was my comllaint before, the whole lookup was serialized, now it appears parallelized. I understand server-side improvement, but to remove client-side serialization, requires a quiet update…? @brian ?

3

The versions tab shows as soon as there is any other version (including library). The lookup is for qobuz/tidal translation outside of library. No quiet update here.

4

Sure. But an hour ago, the updates appeared to serialize before playback started, indeed before the spinner went away. Now the spinner goes away, later (very little later) the icons go away, and music starts quickly.

Of course I can’t really tell the exact sequence, it may just be that things became faster overall.

Anyway, this detail aside, with cloud integration a part of so many everyday operations, speed is very critical…

5

Fwiw I agree with your more general observations about speed of operation. The new search is fantastic, a huge improvement on previously. However, compared to the near-instant Tidal app, the few seconds if takes to return a result still feels painfully slow to me.

6

@brian @mike Another example that indicates a processing flow issue, not a perf problem at root.

I go into the artist browser, sorted by most played. I click on an artist with 5 - 30 albums.

What I get is

  1. (Pretty much instantly) Name, photo, web links, tracks. Beneath that it says Albums, and the Roon logo showing a wait state
  2. The wait goes away in less than a second, typically, and the album list is fully populated. Excellent.
  3. After 1-2 seconds, the albums disappear and the wait symbol comes back, animating. It stays for longer than the initial display, about 2 seconds, and then the album list comes back.

The complete album display in step 2 shows the query perf including Tidal and Qobuz is fine. But the disappearance and wait shows it’s a client-side flow problem: even if it is doing some important work, such as fetching more version info from the clouds, it should not tear down the GUI. (And I have not seen any change in the album list, so far.

Nucleus, internal SSD 2 TB, Eero mesh to internet/iPad/zone, gigabit internet, iPad Pro 11’.