Not a virtual machine. It’s just that Roon OS has swapping RAM to disk turned off. Therefore, either there is enough RAM and all is ok, or there is not enough RAM and then it crashes. If there is more RAM than „enough“, the additional RAM is unused and does nothing.
(In contrast, general-purpose operating systems can swap RAM content to disk if there is not enough RAM for the running tasks. This avoids crashing in unpredictable interactive environments as you can’t predict how much stuff the user will start, but it can make performance somewhat unpredictable if there is RAM pressure and stuff gets swapped to disk.)
TBH, what you’re experiencing doesn’t seem unusual with Roon. My library is about the same size and Roon is not normally slow, but it does slow down. When that happens I simply restart the Roon Server from the web page and it’s back to normal. If I let it go too long without a restart, I start to see anomalies in my library like duplicate albums. It seems unlikely a Nucleus Titan will improve your performance. Maybe an upgrade to your internet speed? Seems a little low.
Unfortunately, I can confidently say that this won’t resolve the issue of Roon occasionally being slow to respond. I’ve personally tested Roon Core on five different systems, ranging from a 12-year-old desktop to a brand-new mac pro. Across all these setups, Roon sometimes performs incredibly fast but just as often becomes unbearably slow.
Roon’s support team has suggested that network issues might be the cause, but I’ve experimented with three different networks, and the problem persists. It’s clear that Roon’s performance depends on an overwhelming number of variables, which makes it unpredictable.
When Roon slows down or outright refuses to play, I usually switch to Spotify. Unlike Roon, Spotify works reliably about 99.99% of the time. Lately, I’ve been using Spotify a lot more because of this.
While Roon has moments of brilliance when it’s working well, the frequent slowdowns and frustrations make it the least reliable audio player I’ve ever used. For a product that’s marketed as premium, it really needs to address these issues.
As an early adapter it disappoints me to read so many similar experiences. I must say that I already am considering stepping over to Audirvana. Since I just refreshed a lot of hardware that is also capable of being an Audirvana endpoint it looks like nothing is holding me back. Although I would hate to leave, since Roon and I have so many memories… Ah well… We’ll see…
HAPPY NEW YEAR never the less…
EDIT: What also bothers me is that if support starts to realize that they have a problem all they have to say is that it’s a network problem or whatever else they can come up with to move the problem back to you… If I want to hear that I’ll go to my doctor… LOL Besides the fact that you and I and so many others might actually be really smart IT people, knowing exactly what’s going on…
These type of issues among others are reported quite often. Roon has a lot of performance issues they can’t seem to replicate so they just get left as they dot affect everyone.
Just had this experience over last 6 months where mine stops being accessible whilst it’s updating metadata it maxes out the cpu core Roon runs on as soon as it stops all is good. No other apps on same system have an issue only Roon. But no explanation as to why it does this. so I am left with no solution to an issue only Roon has and several other users experience the same thing, they have different hardware and network with little overlaps other than Roon.
That is exactly the one and only reason I invested in a genuine original state-of-the-art ROON NUCLEUS PLUS so there won’t be issues and excuses regarding hardware. I got it out of the box, DID NOT OPEN IT FOR EXTRA MEMORY OR DISK, placed it on a shelf, hooked it up et voila… It played. For a month… Than I had to swap the cheap ass power brick. And now this… And I can guaranty… I have no network issues whatsoever. Oh… Did I say PLUS…?
I trialled AV within the last 3 months, more than once, to two supported endpoints, my Kef LS50W2’S and Chord Poly Mojo2, it suddenly started playing white noise. A bit inconvenient with the Kefs but with headphones it was painful.
I’ve never had software so that before or since.
If you just want to play music and it is well tagged, look at LMS, it is free. Online service integration is not as smooth as Roon, there’s no versions tab equivalent, but if you mainly play your own library of files it’s a good choice IMO.
There’s no OPRA equivalent, there are PEQ plugins that work but are a bit clunky, or use PEQ on your streamer side, a WiiM Pro Plus in my case for headphones. Sounds as good as Roon but not as elegant, arguably.
Hi Grasshopper, thanks for your input. I will not go (back) to LMS although I used it for ages. It was way far ahead of its time, such a shame Logitech killed it…! I even had my own endpoint written in the old, small footprint C with multi core threads and DSD. Sounded damn good…! But working with Qobuz was a problem, it worked more or less, but not enough.
I experience that all the time. One moment—or even one hour—Roon is fast and responsive, and then suddenly it slows to a crawl. A day later, it’s back to being fine again, with no changes on my end.
What I’ve discovered is that Roon is highly dependent on factors like your DNS performance, among other things. Overall, it feels like Roon relies far too heavily on external variables, making it, in my experience, the least reliable player on the market.
My girlfriend often asks why I even bother with Roon when it slows down so frequently that it’s no longer funny. It’s frustrating because, when it works, it’s great—but those moments of frustration happen far too often.
I can imagine how frustrating this must be. Fortunately, I’ve never experienced such speed differences in my system. Roon has always been reliable and fast for me, except in the rare cases where there were known server issues on Roon’s side. The connection between my Core and Endpoint is via Wi-Fi.
With that level of understanding she must love you very much… Good for you…
Since I own a IT company with a data center I have my own DNS servers so they are very close and dedicated to our customers…
LMS is anything but dead. It is decoupled from Logitech, true. Now rebranded as Lyrion (still LMS). The community manages and updates LMS now and will shortly take over the forum from Logitech. The latest stable version is 9.0.1. This is light years ahead of the version when Logitech still supported it. The 9.x version is much better now for dealing with classical (WORK, etc.) and can integrate your local library with Spotify, Tidal, or Qobuz. Doesn’t have all the DSP bells and whistles of Roon, nor the artist/album info added by Roon. But LMS is far from dead.
I uise it as my backup and most likely will switch back to it at end of my sub. The new version is vastly improved and the new look standard of Material Skin is great.
