What works for 15’000 tracks is very different to what works for 250’000 tracks. Roon’s database grows exponentially more complex the more you add tracks, because those tracks are interconnected. Just to emphasise how different the use cases are, here’s a post from @brian, RoonLabs’ CTO, where he touches on how different dealing with a 300’000 track library is, as compared to the more usual ones.
This is not a good idea.
The hardware @mike recommended for your use case as a strict minimum has a passmark of around 6500. He is actually pretty explicitely recommending that you get something that’s even faster, and that’s in the context of a super-optimised Roon system. The processor you want to use is around 2100, and to top it off it will have stuff that isn’t Roon to deal with.
Behind the scenes, Roon is a complex database. The more tracks you have (and your father has a lot of them), the more complex the database, because those tracks, and those albums, are interconnected. Of course, there’s nothing stopping you from trying…
There’s a longer explanation right here, and @mike linked to it:
"Roon’s library management is based around an object database. This means that instead of storing data in the traditional tabular form, we model your music as a web of interconnected entities and their relationships to one another.
For a typical music library, Roon is tracking millions of objects–everything from tracks and albums to works, performances, labels, genres, credits, and a dozen other kinds-of-things. Modern CPUs, generous memory allotments, and modern solid state disks are enabling technologies for software like Roon.
Together, they allow us to keep your library “live”, and continuously ready for browsing and playback.
They enable us to perform complex queries that would be impractical for a traditionally architected application, and they let us perform background processing on your music library in order to continually improve the user experience.
Many core-less systems shoehorn library management into a low-cost embedded processor that already exists within the system (typically, these are about as powerful as a 3-5 year old cell phone). Roon would not be able to do what it does within those constraints."