Why is Roon so resource hungry? And is Roon development hamstrung...?

I like your analogy here…hence I’m wary of a Nucleus & figure I’d be best served with a Nucleus plus on the basis of my ever expanding library.

A NUC/ROCK is much cheaper than a Nucleus. They really are simple to build and load up with Ropieee. Lots of guides on YouTube, the Roon KB and threads here.

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Thank you, this information about your use case (library size, NAS etc.) is helpful.
Lots of good advice here.
My own observations:

Brian explains the problem with a NAS. The requirement to scan the storage, instead of getting notifications, is quite likely a factor here. I would guess that local storage, internal or USB, would be a bigger improvement than anything else.
I don’t know about your prices, but storage costs have gone down dramatically. I added one more backup location after my NAS failed (mostly photography), and a 12 TB external USB drive cost $250 here. I would look hard at that.

My library is much smaller than yours, 1,700 albums, 1.4 TB. So my experienc3 doesn’t necessarily translate. But this shows the playback performance of my regular i3 Nucleus: when playing a 24/96 high res file and doing room correction the load factor is 33X, I.e, it is using 3 % of the processing capacity.

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Just in PM now with wizard - he’s found NUC’s for me, ssd drive to stores the core if I recall…haven’t looked at NUC guides in months.

Thanks Andy.

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Hi Nostro,

Better to use an m.2 SSD for the internal NUC memory (Samsung m.2 SSDs are generally good).These are significantly faster (and much smaller) than conventional SSD drives, and every bit as easy to install as a conventional SSD in an Intel NUC.

Roon supplies pretty good instructions for the installation of Roon Rock (Roon Core + Optimized Linux based operating system) on its web pages. You don’t have to install an operating system on your NUC - just the Roon Rock download.

The only minor difficulty I found was locating the ‘Codecs’ file for different music file types which is required to be installed. The instructions weren’t completely clear when I set up my NUC a couple of years or so ago, but hopefully they have improved. If not, someone from the forum will help. It is just a question of locating the file - installing it is straightforward.

I run Roon on an Intel NUC8i5 (with around 3,000 albums), and that is absolutely fine. Should be ok with 6,000, but if you want to play safe then an 8th gen i7 (NUC8i7) would give you plenty of leeway.

By the way, what is the model of your NAS?

Good luck.

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RAID is not a backup scheme…it is for high availability. Most home users don’t need RAID because they don’t need the high availability that RAID offers. I hate NAS for home use. Roon works MUCH better with a separate Core with local storage for music.

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Just because you hate NAS, doesnt mean there are no valid use cases for millions of users.

I have years of very positive experience with NAS and it has certainly proven to be much more reliable than some software, not to name anyone.

See linked post above.

I can only agree to that. After finally ‘daring’ to move core to my DS1815+ I’m more than happy as the performance is definitely sufficient (but I’m not asking the NAS for extensive DSP conversions) and changes to the library are instantaneously picked up by the core.

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Unfortunately my library was just too big. I would have preferred to stay on my 1618+ but it was getting too sluggish.

even when putting it into an SSD and increasing the RAM?

Yep library was on SSD, Ram=32GB. Still no-go, well, slow-go…

You can always find exceptions to anything. There are people who have success running Roon on shared laptops or desktops that are also acting as their general purpose computer. Some people have success with WIFI or mesh networks, and some have success using a NAS and backing up to dropbox and/or USB sticks, etc. However, for the highest probability of flawless operation, I would avoid all of these situations if possible. Just my opinion.

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Forget Wifi, use Ethernet! A cable is a cable :wink:
Wifi is nice for surfing on a phone or tablet, but for everything else its too prone to failure…

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I think that Nas has an Atom processor which whilst fine for a Nas is slow compared to say an i3 in single thread instructions. About 3 times slower.than the i3 in a v7 nuc so increased memory etc wouldn’t help too much really.

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I spent more on my home network setup than I did on the Roon music server setup. But the network was already in place before I ever heard of Roon so the expenses were widely separated. I did have the house wired for Ethernet afterwards due in part to the posts I read from @Jim_F.

The NUC8I7BEH/ROCK with (16gb ram - m2 250 drive - internal Sata storage) plus (external backup storage and the USB disc player for ripping) altogether was less expensive than the laptops I was looking at and it works very well all the time.

I don’t notice any resource issues and often have 3 zones going all day long. No drops or skips, it just works.

It can be difficult to decide between a dedicated server or a general use computer, and wired vs wireless, but I can say the dedicated server on a wired network seems to be the best based on my experience.

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we need to generate those pretty waveforms somehow… same goes for cross fading analysis… it means we have to decode all the audio. You have 6000 albums? let’s say that’s 60k tracks. each one average of 3 minutes… 180k minutes. that’s 125 days of music. If we had all the cores on your i7 crunching on those decodes + analysis, I’m sure we could do it in a few days. But the default settings are less brutal to your system, so that might chug along for a couple or a few weeks, depending on your cpu performance.

Who else does this type of thing and feels like “resource hungry”? It makes no sense to ask for a Lamborghini and then complain about its fuel usage.

if you used streaming services and the services gave us their raw audio content, we could do that work once for all users that stream. Unfortunately, they don’t give us access to all the content.

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Thanks Danny…your explanation makes sense. :sunglasses:

Just to clear things up…

I am certainly not complaining…I was looking to understand why Roon is (to me) resource hungry. Further, I sense based on various threads, others feel similarly. This is neither good or bad. Of course, we therefore, require the hardware to run Roon to our desired needs.

What I’m still interested in hearing about is whether Roon is somewhat hamstrung in terms of its future developments as given its resource ‘needs’ & its hardware sale of Nucleus clearly Roon can’t push those boundaries too far.

Perhaps there’s ample scope within those parameters, but just looking at Roon Nucleus as a bare minimum for those with stated library in Roon documentation (can’t recall the exact number off that top of my head), it seems that major improvements e.g. version 2 are constrained.

Cheers. :smiley:

@hmack
Thank you for your detailed reply…wizardofoz has been giving me some assistance with exactly that…I just got a bit ‘scared’ reading some threads about bios & more.

Ummmm…my NAS is a 2 bay Qnap…can’t see it’s model #…I’d need to go online to check up on it. It is just an entry model…top of the box tells me it is quad core 1gb ddr4 ram. As it was my first foray into the world of NAS , figured I’d start slow. I was rather impressed with myself setting it up (without help), including RAID. That to me was some computing achievement. :rofl:

We no longer talk about what we are working on, but I’m not sure I understand the statement you made. You are wondering if nucleus development is causing us to bottleneck on Roon, or something… or did I interpret that wrong?

Mine is perfect as a backup device, raid in itself is no backup of your data but with raid the data is generally less likely to be completely lost with a failed disk and there is nothing wrong with using it on a device that is the backup. It’s way faster at backing up and has faster access to my data for all the different use cases I have. Disk dies nas is still usable, swap disk Nas rebuilds. My music lives on my rock , backs up to Nas, Nas back up to cloud, backs up my photos and docs of the pc and host my video library which Is baked up to another usb drive.