Mac mini, quad core i7, 16GB RAM, 250GB SSD with Catalina and Roon Core (just this installed), 4TB SSD on USB.
Networking Gear & Setup Details
Netgear 1Gbps, all wired, service is 350mbps down/ 25mbps up. No issues ever with service or speed.
Connected Audio Devices
dCS Rossini over wired network
Number of Tracks in Library
248k
Description of Issue
Searching for Nils Frahm. Waiting over two minutes for a result. I have a video but of course this system is primitive enough not to allow me to upload this.
1 Like
AceRimmer
(Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast!)
2
Not sure what you have going on but my results for Nils Frahm came up before I had finished typing.
Android phone and Antipodes Edge as Core.
I regularly monitor CPU usage. Never goes above 30%. If people can run Roon Core on a NAS, it should run just fine on this machine. There is NOTHING else running on this machine. Even Spotlight is disabled.
Not a Mac user here, so just guessing, but if that means 30% for all 4 cores - and Roon actually working on a single core per zone only - your Mac is probably choking beyond 25% already.
If your core has been up and running for a while I’d suggest checking RAM usage. I’m running a comparably sized library (but smaller than yours) on a 16GB Mac mini M1 and search tasks are pretty snappy, but only while RAM usage stays below ~5.5GB. Above that and things start to slow down. Try restarting your core.
It could be you hit a point when Roons metadata servers had a high load it happens from time to time and doesn’t affect everyone and often it’s just a blip or its constant when it’s a major issue I have had a few of these over the last week but nothing major.
A large library on Mac is pretty much known to have issues as on Mac they are still using Mono to emulate .net and it is known to have memory issues. This is why Roon was always recommending to use Window for larger libraries as it’s native .net. Now that Microsoft have made .net available on different platforms they have migrated Linux over to .net 6 a and scrapped mono it’s now more than capable. Switching Mac’s over is being worked on but the release of the M1 has caused delays as it wasn’t out for sometime and is still not wholly stable. When it is Roon will update Mac’s.
I have tried restarting the core often. That does not help. I have profiled my internal ssd and external ssd. I get above 300MBps read/write consistently. Internet connection same - and I measure it on the mini. Ping times to my Rossini are minimal.
Most of the time, even when playing, cpu usage is < 5%. I actually leave activity monitor with the per-cpu history plot on, and do not see a high usage per core.
Roon tends to spread itself to all four physical cores. It does not seem to be using the hyperthreading in the cores. My i7 mac is a 2.6GHz quad core, so 4 physical cores, 8 if you count hyperthreading:
This is with Roon playing to the Rossini - you can see activity per core - in the last couple of seconds I searched for something I had never searched for before (to avoid caching) and you can see the spike in activity. The result of that search came back in 2-3 seconds. Searching for Nils Frahm was instantaneous right now.
I find when connections to Tidal and Qobuz stall out affecting search that I need to reboot my router. This happens once a week approximately. I am trying several things to locate the problem.
It will be their metadata servers. In all cases this has raised its ugly head it boils down to their servers. They use a CDN network so it’s possible for some areas to be affected and others not if one area is behaving badly. Which CDN your provider connects to is different per provider and what DNS they are using. Ideally it should be the closest geographically but this is not always the case. Some ISP seem to have more issues with Cloudflare (Roons CDN provider) than others. Mine Virgin Media in the UK seem to have had issues from time to time doing my research.
AceRimmer
(Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast!)
20
You posted in the evening USA time and it’s still not even 8am USA ECT.
I would not expect any official Roon response considering those factors yet…
