I thought I would get back with my preliminary result. I tried your suggested of moving my Roon core to another system (a Windows workstation). When running on the Windows system and using the same library files, it appears that everything works fine. There is no hesitation in starting tracks, mid playback stops, etc.
This Workstation is physically wired to the same router as the Synology, which points to a problem with Roon running on Synology. I noted you’ve handled a similar issue before:
Collectively, this indicates it’s not a network issue per se. I’m doing nothing fancy with the network interface on the Synology, MTU of 1500, etc.
There are no aggresive power off settings on the Synology, and as you can see it’s a top-of-the-line model with capacity to spare. Furthermore, I’ve confirmed the problem occurs when the Synology is otherwise idle so I’m confident it has nothing to do with capacity there.
I will continue to run in this config for awhile to see if anything goes bad, but the problem was always quickly repeatable so I suspect it will continue to be stable.
What’s next?