Here the KB article on Audio Analysis settings: https://kb.roonlabs.com/Audio_Analysis
I assume this is not really meant for me…I’ve run more permutations of hardware and core versions than most so I know all about what will work after 3 years of running roon 
For memory the default is throttled IIRC so slow and steady but on a huge library this will take weeks or months on a slow NAS. Taking all the cores available will cause a fair amount of system time and could cause playback issues on a slower setup - even a desktop system and on a NAS you could have other performance issues depending on other NAS based apps running too.
@Peter_Schwartzman I tried a new setup on the same spec MM the other day on 270K track library on a NAS and after 4 days running flat out 2 cores it had only managed 25K tracks analysed and the fans were still running full tilt. I didn’t try to play anything as it was more of an experiment for fun…but clearly it was going to be running for some time and as my room is not air-conditioned all the time it was getting really warm in there and I killed the test.
One of the things you could do is run the analysis throttled during playback and then put it at full tilt when you end the day so it does most of the work overnight. But with a NAS, yes, it will be slow b/c they usually don’t have a lot of processing power.
One of the reasons I use a powerful server (xeon) and not a NAS.
Yes, I’m been using Roon Server on the UP2 board N4200 for month without any issue… streaming Qobuz… and bunch of FLAC locally.
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Brian,
Thanks for the additional information.
So I have been running my Roon on a Synology NAS DS416Play with around 2000 albums stored. I am now having glitches which can probably be put down to the NAS (which is only operating the Roon setup). The question is what do I replace it with? Presumably if I get another Synology product the transfer from old to new will be simple. Any advice on model types
A model that uses an actual i3 or i5 Intel CPU. An i3 is the recommended base minimum CPU for running a Roon Server.
I’m not sure Synology makes an i3 or better based NAS, if not, then you will probably have to go with a QNAP, or a ReadyNAS. Roon has QNAP installers, but, the ReadyNAS would be a do it yourself project.
IMHO, I would put the money towards a NUC and use Windows or ROCK. Keep the NAS and use it for storage. Because a NUC is going to be half, or less, than a new up to spec NAS. Something like, 500 to 600 vs. 1300 and up.
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Thanks Daniel…I’m not up to speed with the acronyms, what’s a NUC?
Small pc from Intel Next Unit of Computing if I remember correctly
They do have them, but they are only in the “xs+” and higher end “FlashStation” models. Home users are unlikely to have them.
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I chose an i5 Mac Mini, 2018 model. Been running great for about 15 months now. A NUC would have been other cheaper choice, but since I had other Apple gear, and no Mac, I decided it would be a good addition to my overall environment, and I was not wrong. I have a large desk-side Windows machine but only powered it on twice in last year, primarily to keep Windows 10 current. Most of my work is done with 2 iPads and phone. Mac occasionally used for general computing and Office 365 but primarily Roon.
Good luck.
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After reading the explanation from Brian, it seems to me that there are two ends to the Roon pipeline that create choke points, and there are potentially other things along the way that can cause choke points as well.
Starting with the two ends, there are requirements of the core at one end, and it seems the equipment used to power the Roon apps at the other end. The Roon apps are what displays the graphics and images so we can interact with Roon. While it seems that the core gets a lot of attention, the device powering the app should be given more attention, as well as what comes between both ends.
I have been concerned with my Core lately thinking that is the source of my slow performance along with the fact that my core runs on an Atom processor in a Synology NAS. But I’m not so sure this is the main issue. I’ve done different things to isolate my issues, and have found that the Roon app runs very well on my somewhat old 9.7 inch iPad Pro, but on my new iMac Mini with a six core i7 processor, it sometimes takes too long for my large playlists to load, to add new albums, and to change tracks, etc. On my ancient iPhone 7, it can be painful waiting for things to load. Because of this variation in performance from app to app, I am not sure the core is the sole problem, and it is interesting to me that my most powerful device is not the best performing device.
Other choke points in the pipeline could be my wifi but my I constantly test and optimize the wifi throughout my house. When I run Roon on my iPad app, it is right next to the iMac so the wifi they are getting is the same. Additionally, there are times Roon runs reasonably well on all my devices, even my iPhone. Then other times it does not. My best guess is since I integrate with TIDAL, the choke point might be the service that provides the bulk of my music. Or perhaps Roon can’t always pick up SongKick info and that causes an issue? It seems there are things that can cause poor performance that have nothing to do with the core or the app at all.
As a side note, someone will need to explain to me why graphics performance is so important. Most of what Roon displays is text, and album cover artwork which is fine as a 3-5MB jpeg image. My understanding is this is fairly low demand graphics. You don’t need 4k and you are not doing complex image editing like you’d do in Photoshop or if I was gaming. I agree that Roon should run well on integrated graphics. I’m not sure why this kind of program would need a discrete graphics card.
It does seem important to have a solid core. There, I understand how Roon needs the power to pull in all the data from the various sources to create that beautifully organized graphic display. But as I mentioned, the experience for me indicates that on an iPad, my core seems to run great on an Atom processor, but on other devices it does not. At times it is great everywhere, other times is sucks everywhere. Is something else going on?
This is important to me because I want to improve performance so Roon runs great on all my apps. At the same time I don’t want to spend money needlessly looking to solve issues that don’t exist. Perfection is a noble thing to chase but it has some frustrations. This quest has me feeling like Don Quixote. It seems that a fuller explanation with a better paradigm would be helpful. Roon could also deploy a diagnostic tool, similar to the signal path window, that would help isolate various performance issues along the entire pipeline such as Wifi, TIDAL, Qobuz the core, or the app.
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Great to see someone else posting similar concerns to those of mine. I’ve spent months trying to figure out what the heck Roon actually needs to run 100% seamless all the time… but still only like 99.9% there.
As of now, my assumption is that due to reasons unknown, it requires a combination of very robust network connectivity AND fully-dedicated core device with pretty much no other processes running in the background. If one or another is not in place, the user experience suffers.
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What you are seeing is graphics, not, text in the way you are thinking about it. A picture of text is still a picture that needs rendering.
Why would Roon pull in artist profile text from AllMusic and convert it to a graphic image? All the hyperlinks from AllMusic are preserved so I’m not so sure that text is a graphic image.
I would think Roon would use an API from AllMusic to quickly and easily pull in text but that is just a guess.
All of the roon screens are renders using something approaching a gaming engine.
“Roon’s interface is built more like a video game than a music app, and while the engine is designed to hold huge amounts of content in some screens (tens of thousands of albums; hundreds of thousands of tracks), the architecture of the album screen wasn’t built for these cases.”
The hyperlinks aren’t preserved as they no longer point to allmusic but to within roon.
There’s a lot of information on the screen rendering if you search the forum or Google.
Anything you can see is a graphic image. Text needs to be rendered on a screen, any screen, with fonts and sizes and colors. That’s graphics.
Though, to be sure, every modern graphics engine, including OpenGL, contains various short-cut pathways for rendering text to graphics.
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