Ok since 1.6 and the introduction of Qobuz the performance of Roon has become at times completely unacceptable, simple searches can take up to a minute, clicking on an album this morning from Qobuz took 30secs to display. What on earth is going on? If I remove Qobuz then its better, if I remove Tidal as well bacl to instant searches and clicking on albums is instant. It feels to me something was rushed out before it was full ready. What ever it is they need to sort this out fast as its just not good enough at the moment. I love Roon but this becoming a real pain in the neck.
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If there’s one truth with software than that there’s never a good definition of “ready for release”. Simply because it’s almost impossible to predict what will happen in the field. Even when you apply really rigorous procedures (think the aviation industry) you still cannot catch all field cases beforehand.
Performance testing cloud based solutions which depend on third party performance in more than one way isn’t simple. Like if the third party solutions scale differently (or not at all) … on the other hand: without having the thing out in the field one might never know what tweaks are needed. And luckily Roon doesn’t actually fly so a bit more trial and error might be acceptable - and to be expected.
It’s probably important to report back not just the understandable frustration but also the exact circumstances under which things were awful - so Roonlabs can better investigate and adopt. The more information they have the easier it will be to act.
Already have a ticket for it. I also understand about your points, its just this feels like its doing more harm than good and its been out nearly 3 months without any sign of improvement.
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Not that I do know what goes on in the Roon cloud - but changing an architecture which is actually running and delivering a service (even if not perfect) isn’t something which happens over night. It’s more like a (slow) process - as long as the architecture is believed to be capable of finally living up to its promise. If not - well - the changes required in that case will take some time too. 
It’s most likely system dependent. I have had no problems running Roon with Tidal and Qobuz. I use a dedicated powerful tower PC for just my music and that acts as a music server throughout my house. I also have a robust ethernet net connection coming into and throughout my house. I’d like to think that this is the reason for my successful steaming but I could be just lucky.
I’ve seen others complain about this before, so you’re not alone.
I wonder if the actual location of the users experiencing issues with streaming integration matters.
My network is rock solid with 200mb/s internet. At the times of slow searches and access I test the connection and it’s fine. I use clouflare DNS, but it makes no difference what I use it’s the same performance,.sometimes its ok sometimes it’s just dire. No specific time of day either it can happen at any time. Core is on i7 dedicated machine running Rock. Tidal and Qobuz apps do not have this issue and are lightning fast. It’s the same if I access Roon via laptop , tablet or phone. Also my Bluesound Node 2 app lightning fast
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I would bet. Qobuz is also still working on their side of things as well.
Again, that depends on where you are. ISPs are already throttling connections and speeds in the background for certain applications, while setting up exemptions for “speed test” sites.
Not saying the issue is actual network speed, just pointing out that saying some speed test results are great, is not really reliable anymore, imho. Kind of like the fudging graphic card manufacturers did in their drivers for graphic card speed tests.
It may not be so much your local (inter-) network but the various connections which have to get coordinated by the “Roon cloud”. Once you initiate a search data’s travelling between data centers (DCs) around the world. You ask Roon (somewhere in the US) then Roon asks Tidal and qobuz, aggregates the answers somehow and answers to you. Since you’ll have to get the answer fitting for your location maybe qobuz (using AWS, AFAIK) and Tidal DCs across the ocean have to get asked. They have to answer to US DCs (where the Roon cloud lives - in various DCs too, again AFAIK) so a lot of chances to introduce unwanted delays which could add up.
Your qobuz or Tidal direct calls get probably answered by a DC “near by”.
No throttling here, my ISP doesn’t do it. Besides it would be the same for the Tidal, Qobuz and my Bluesound but they are speedy and fine. All was fine until they moved the server structure. If I can stream 4k netflix my ISP isn’t going to throttle low bandwith music. I am also not alone with this issue there load support threads saying the same thing, so something is not right somewhere.
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“Tail latency” is the technical term for this pain. A distributed system can have very good average response time, but if it has high tail latency (95% response time quantile) for some users or queries, those stick out. Large service providers (think Amazon, Facebook, Google) with extensive CDNs (content-delivery networks) over-provision to ensure low tail latency, but this is not as easy technically or financially for smaller players like Roon. The increased service complexity in Roon 1.6 (Qobuz integration, new cloud-based Roon Radio, …) is likely to be tickling high-latency situations for some users/queries/locales. In my case, there’s very large variance in Roon search response time, from almost instant to 10s of seconds, with no obvious pattern.
From professional experience, getting rid of latency bottlenecks in a distributed system requires sustained gathering of network statistics, deep digging into them, and repeated experimentation. All of these take longer if you are a small service provider with a small user base (relatively speaking).
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It must matter because I am having no issues at all.
Until Roon has a clear diagnostic, making such an announcement is premature and would preclude user reports that are valuable in tracking down the issue. In addition, slowness may arise from different causes for different users and queries. In your case, all searches seem to be slow. In mine, only some. Same or different cause? Roon, Qobuz (no reason to think Qobuz through Roon and Qobuz app use the same network and code paths, so comparing the two does not put Qobuz in the clear), different connectivity to cloud resources?
Qobuz seems the worst offender. But even Tidal on its own is noticeably slower than it was. I am beginning to think I might drop qobuz until its sorted as its dragging down the whole Roon experience.
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@Fernando_Pereira - an announcement will defuse customer frustration. This issue is wide spread, is happening in multiple time zones in multiple countries. There is a point and time when a line is crossed between willing “beta” tester and frustrated paying customer with a fairly considerable h/w investment.
Roon is now a viable commercial product being sold in HiFi retailers. I imagine yet another support issue for the dealers cannot be welcome. This isn’t just you willing to tolerate yet another bug.
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Hi @Vincent_Kennedy I’m in the UK and my experience since subscribing to Roon in January (because of the Qobuz integration) has not been frustrating. I’ve been a Qobuz subscriber for nearly three years and it’s been generally reliable. The searches I tried just now were fine but maybe I’m not looking closely enough.
Is there a particularly bad Artist search I could test? Should it be something like “Queen” which matches mutliple artists, or “Christine and the Queens” which matches one? Should I be looking at the time between typing Enter to start the search and the search results appearing, or the time for Albums > View All which seems to be instant in most cases?
Happy to help gather some data but I think we need to be testing something consistent.
david
PS All systems have bugs. Customer reports can help find them
@David_Small Today searching for Elvis Costello, Daniel Ratliff and the Night Sweats, Joe Jackson, Talking Heads, St. Vincent, and Alabama Shakes all have the same slow response.
It’s Sunday, I like to fill my Queue with music that I haven’t listened to in a while. Just looking for a handful of old favorites has become frustrating.
I readily understand that all systems have bugs. Acknowledging the bugs is one of the differentiators between a mature software organization and another. I have experienced this same sort of acknowledgement hesitancy from many of the vendors I have worked with over the years including Oracle, SAP, Cisco, Juniper, Citrix, ServiceNow, Peoplesoft, etc… The difference being there I have account reps, ticket prioritization, and often direct contact with the development Team. With Roon it’s a little to informal to really feel comfortable that issues are being addressed.
Lastly, I can’t tell the path for searches. The same search in the native Qobuz is nearly instantaneous. Are my Qobuz searches in Roon routing through Roon hosts or directly to Qobuz?