Tag Query Performance

Support
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My tagging as well.

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@eric Hi Eric, is there any progress with this? Have the guys found the problem areas?

Cheers!

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All ---- Please be advised that our tech team is still looking into this behavior and trying to reproduce in our QA lab with the feedback you have provided thus far.

Once the team has provided me with an update on their progress I will be sure to share their feedback with all of you in a timely manor. Please rest assured that this on our radar :microscope:

Thank you for your patience!
-Eric

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No problem at all. Just wondering how things were going :slight_smile:
If they need any further info or testing, don’t hesitate to let either myself or James know (I’m sure he would also be willing to assist further)

Cheers!

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Yes, absolutely. Happy to do further tests or provide additional info as to what I’ve experienced with tag queries.

1 Like
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Hello @eric, I am curious if there is any progress in solving the issues of tag performance or did it fell of the radar?

Two months ago it’s reported and it’s getting tedious now I have to say.

When there are over (about) 250 tracks tagged (no special nested/combined tags selected), just one. On all devices. The page does not load when I go to Tags / Show All Tracks, all other options do show artists, albums or composers.

Tag Tempo: Mid does have 292 tracks:

1
1.jpg1431×903 440 KB

When I select Show All Tracks the page is partial loaded and does not contain tracks of the selected tag at all. I kept it loading for some hours, but it did not change.

2-tag
2-tag.jpg1431×899 178 KB

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hi @eric,

Now the dust after the 1.5 release has settled - I hope - I am still curious what the status is of the issue “Tag Query Performance”.

As I tried to explain in my post above (29th april), selecting just one tag (with more than about 250 tracks) does not load at all. :hearts: tracks with over 700 tracks load instantly.

Thanks in advance for touching base with me :wink:

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Hey folks,

We are taking a look at this now that 1.5 has shipped.

I have a few questions :slight_smile:

First, @Sallah_48 @James_I are you guys seeing symptoms like @Paulb’s above? Meaning, things failing to load completely? Or are things just slow, and load eventually?

Second, for all three of you, can you remind me (or link to):

  • Total # of tracks in library
  • Total number of tags
  • For maybe 1-3 tags that are experiencing issues:
    • What types of content are tagged
    • Roughly how many of each type (so like “200 albums, 30 artists, and 5300 tracks” )

We spent some time on this earlier this week, and things were pretty snappy for us, so I want to make sure you guys are all experiencing the same kind of problem, and make sure we’re able to see it happen in-house.

Thanks for your patience on this guys, much appreciated.

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Hi @mike

Thanks for following up on this. In the meantime, I had messed about with files locations in a big way and the tags were not aligning to files on my PC anymore, so Ive reinstalled Roon, and am still in the process of restructuring my folders, hopefully definitively and then can begin tagging again, but tags are not on the cards in my work flow at the moment. However… I had at one point around 2000 tags i guess in total, and was NOT experiencing a complete failure to load stuff, just long delays when, if i remember, I’d be displaying the albums relating to (many) multiple tags. Not the display of the tags themselves, but the elements within the tags was taking the time. Hope this still can help!

1 Like
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hi @mike ,

Thanks for coming back.

Total # of tracks in library (61.000)
Total number of tags (45)
For maybe 1-3 tags that are experiencing issues:
What types of content are tagged

I just took a look at those tags, I thought there were only tracks tagged, but there was also one (1) composition tagged. When I removed the composition the misbehaving tags loaded… (when selecting View All Tracks, default view of tags always displayed normally).
I added another composition to a tag with 9 tracks and the same problem occurred.

Roughly how many of each type (so like “200 albums, 30 artists, and 5300 tracks” )
I thought only tracks, but there was one composition in several tags, which I just removed.
I guess between 800 and 1.000 tracks.

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Hi Mike. As with Sallah and Paulb, thanks for coming back to this to take a look. Tag performance is pretty critical to my use modes for Roon.

But first, I have to address some user comments I’ve seen a few times in the past few weeks, related to Sallah’s response above, that I think would be a massively higher priority for Roon: if moving storage locations and files around disconnects a track or an album from a Roon Tag or a Playlist (or other attribute), this is a huge, huge deal. I had read comments from Roon staff indicating that once Roon has something in its library, it could be moved across storage locations without losing its status within Roon. If this is not true, and there is a possibility that Playlists and Tags (and other attributes???) could be lost by moving storage locations, then let’s forget about Tag query performance for now and focus on that problem. I’ve been beating a drum about inter-operability with other media players, and the potential superiority of file-embedded metadata relative to interoperability. But if Roon is not inter-operable with itself, relative to file locations, to me that is a disaster waiting to happen regarding all the curating work we do to enjoy our music as we like to. The idea of Sallah having to redo thousands of tags breaks my heart, and scares the heck out of me. Does this also happen relative to primary versions, album identifications, favorites, etc.? I sure hope never to find out.

Thanks for indulging the rant. Now, onto your questions:

I’ve never seen anything totally fail to load. Hang for a long time, yes, but never totally fail.

What I see are speed issues with (1) tag queries where the tag is applied at one object level (e.g. artist) and the query is to display all albums or tracks of an object with that tag; and (2) combination tag queries, like +TAG and -TAG together. Just looks like a lot of processing before it can display results.

Performance might be a tad better with Roon 1.5 It is hard to say because performance was variable before. Always slow with large amounts of objects, but sometimes 15 seconds and sometimes 60 seconds for the same query. I couldn’t correlate it with external factors like DSP or playing high resolution tracks or something else that my be taxing the core, albeit I cannot speak to when my kids are jamming up the network.

115,014 tracks in library
85 tags
I usually tag artists or albums.
Tags that have experienced problems: between 80-200 artists, representing between 3000 and 10,000 tracks.

Hope that helps! Thanks again!

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Hi,

I’m running Roon on a good old Mac Mini 2012 with a spinning hdd and a library of about 60k tracks.
Performance of artists, albums, track views is good, no problem at all, even when focussing on predefined criteria like Played, format etc.

However, when “Tags” are included, performance drops significantly.
Example: toggle “Played” filter from “+” to “-” is instantaneous on 60k tracks. When adding a Tag (that involves a subset of 3k tracks) to the Focus, it takes more than 20 seconds to rebuild the “Played” view.

Is this a known issue?
I’m planning to migrate to ROCK with a i5 NUC and SSD, will this help?

Kind gegards,
Gerard

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Hi Gerard,

Other users experience slow performance with Tags as well: you can read more about it in this issue:

Paul

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Thanks for pointing out Paul, looks like the same issue!
As I understand, a faster machine won’t fixi it, hopefully it will be in a patch!

Kind regards,
Gerard

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No, I don’t think it will fix it, maybe you’ll will win some seconds.
I have had a Mac mini 2012 and a spinning disk, with the same amount of tracks as you have.
I went to a NAS with SSD, though the performance was acceptable to me, after the migration everything is much more snappier.

Paul

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Hi @Gerard_Burgstede ---- Thank you for the report and sharing this observation you have made with us! The additional feedback and insight are both very appreciated!

Moving forward, I have went ahead and moved your posts over to “this” thread so we can keep you up to date as our techs make progress. Additionally, I would like to add your report to our team’s investigation ticket and as such would very kindly like to ask you to please provide the information requested here at your earliest convenience.

Additionally, I see from your report that your core machine is making use of a spinning HDD. While I don’t believe this to be the cause of the issue here I would definitely recommend running your Roon DB on a SSD as the current configuration is falling below our minimum requirements. I can see that you are considering migrating to ROCK using a NUCi5 w/SSD installed :+1:

Just wanted to give you the “head up” because I want to make sure that you get the best experience possible while using Roon, and if there is an underpowered device driving the system you may encounter other limitations/performance issues moving forward.

-Eric

1 Like
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Hi Eric,

Thanks for the follow-up. Although performance-without-tags i.m.h.o. is quite good even on my low end system, I already ordered my NUC, but main reason for this is to have a dedicated server.

Below my stats:
Total number of albums: 3.8k
Total number of tracks: 59k
Total number of tags: 10

I only use tags on track level, tags giving performance issues are tags for “star” ratings (like in iTunes/JRiver), typically tags that involve larger number of tracks.
Focus on Tag “3 stars” : 3.5k tracks (13 sec)
Focus on Tag “4 stars” : 3k tracks (11 sec)
Focus on Tag “3 stars” & “-Played” : 2.7k tracks (25 sec)
Focus on Tag “4 stars” & “-Played” : 0.3k tracks (11 sec)

Although results vary, I sometimes notice that the “Played & Tag” focus is significantly faster than the other way around: “Tag & Played”. Does this make sense? Unfortunately, quite difficult to reproduce, due to caching of previous focus results?

Hope this helps!

Kind regards,
Gerard

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Thanks for getting in touch and taking the time to answer our questions @Gerard_Burgstede! Very appreciated!

I have added your feedback to our investigation ticket so the team has it on hand. If they require any additional information I will be sure to reach out immediately!

As mentioned to others in this thread, once the team has updated my report I will be sure to share their thoughts/findings with everyone asap. Thank you for your patience during this process!

-Eric

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Just some other observations: not only creating the ‘tag’ focus causes huge delays, but also during playing (random pauses of sometimes a minute before a track starts playing) or when clicking an album or artist link of a track when you’re in the play queue when a ‘tag’ focus is active

For those also experience these issues, I now use a (not ideal) but easy workaround that prevents those delays: after defining your focus once, move all tracks to a temporary Playlist and just play that list…
Performance is then great again, as expected, but a real fix in the next release would be appreciated😉

Kind regards,
Gerard

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I’m reviving this thread after watching Roon just hung for 5 minutes when querying a tag combined with a genre. It’s still going, no query result yet.

The problem with this is that Roon’s apparent sophistication regarding genres, tags, querying, and the album/track browser screen is limited to a single dimension…the sophistication here is illusory because (1) there is very limited boolean logic available to combine tags, genres, other focus items, and (2) the performance is unusably slow.

This is on a fast database SSD quad core wired internet. No reason for hardware-based performance slowdown. I suspect the problem is when a tag is not applied to the object but a different object part of the same “family” – i.e. the tag is on the artist, but I want to see all tracks tagged with that tag on the artist.