I ran DOS and Win3.0 real mode in 640K on an XT. Win3.1 in 2MB on a 286. BeOS 5 in 32MB. WinXP in 64MB. All these were GUI general purpose OSs. They worked. Yes they swapped. ROCK is a CLI OS running a single service (with a few background bits and pieces like networking and SMB). It probably runs in < 1GB and if it doesn’t then it should. Any extra RAM is for the music database which could even be a database file system but is likely ext4 with a seperate database server. When I run ROCK on bare bones Debian CLI on a NUC (no local music just Tidal) it uses very little RAM.
If swap is disabled then Roon will crash when it runs out of memory for the database. It is never going to run out of memory just for DSP - no real time DSP will need more than 10 x the size of the music data stream which at 64bit float 768khz stereo is only 12.2MB per second.
This might be true these days but it is a likely a recommendation born of practicality rather than necessity. For the majorty of Nucleus One users, 8GByte will be plenty and putting more memory in their Nucleus will give zero benefit. In fact, it is likely that the imitations of the Nucleus One processor would start to make the Roon experience less than stellar long before you find that 8GByte is not enough. But: DRAM, in these quantities, is very cheap so why choose the lesser amount if there is even the slightest chance that you will need to expand beyond 8GByte at some point in the future. I don’t think that the same argument can be legitimately be used to justify going beyond 16GByte because a library size and complexity that requires this amount of memory would almost certainly show the limitations of the Nucleus One and give a poor user experience no matter what amount of memory was fitted.
It’s also important to understand the memory architecture of the machine. The Nucleus One only has one SODIMM slot (and the processor only supports a single memory channel) and so whatever amount of RAM you want to fit will have to be provided by a single SODIMM.
Other devices including the Nucleus, Nucleus Plus, Nucleus Titan and ROCK builds based on the (current) supported hardware list all support two memory channels and have slots for two SODIMMs. With these devices it is always better to populate both memory slots with identical memory. I.e 2x4GByte SODIMMs are better than 1 x 8GByte SODIMM and 2x8GByte SODIMMs are better than 1 x 16GByte SODIMM.
Well spotted. I sort of generalised the 16gb to Rock users.
Knowing that a similar spec’d machine to a Nucleus One running Rock with 8gb RAM (not upgradable) can perform well enough up to 80k tracks with active DSP in various forms is capable, but slightly sluggish in normal operation due to the CPU.
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