Brain Farts w/ Roon Nucleus

Hello HiFi Fans, It's me again.  it's the OP, no not the one from Mayberry.

Wanted to update you all on my progress.  First off, eventually I will go the Innuos route. All roads and counsel leads me there, but not just yet.  Purchased a new Degritter RCM on Thursday and that was a priority for me and my vinyl collection.

Spent some quality time in both our upper end Audio Stores here in town.  The first stop has a fella less HiFi and more computer.  We talked a good 45 minutes about the whole Roon scenario I am having and he had many suggestion.

@erik_squires  He did say they don't sell Roon Nucleus anymore.  They now build their own little NUC with a fan, faster everything and more up to date components. They will add the Roon software and get you up and running for less that 50% of a Roon Nucleus Titan.

We talked a lot about network issues.  Some thoughts on next steps there, if it comes to that.

We narrowed down the first step toward a solution as updating the Nucleus RAM.  So, I doubled the RAM and updated the RAM to a much faster model than what was in the old Nucleus.  Cost me all of $30 (on sale).  Easy Peasy fix, just needed to remove a few screws, get under to SSD and install.

So, I am up and running with the next step toward correcting my performance issue after changing Library>Background Audio Analysis Speed setting to Throttled, and doubling the RAM.

Only been a couple of days of playing thus far, so no real results to report.  But I'll let you all know what comes of these changes.

Thanks again for everyone who chimed in and continue the conversation.

Seems you've had some good advice. RAM is important with large libraries and Roon complex interface, I use enterprise level RAM in my custom server as  its extremely reliable and less prone to errors. I also run throttled here, no dsp, volume leveling as well.

I used to run Roon and HQPlayer on an old first-generation mac mini that I upgraded with SSDs and installed Ubuntu linux on. No issues with brain farts unless I used a compute-intensive HQP filter.

I recently bought an ASUS ROG with hefty Nvidia GPU. Again, I wiped Windows immediately and installed Ubuntu. No issues with performance at all, no matter who compute-intensive the HQP filters are. 

For Roon alone, compute and network duties are minimal. RAM and adequate disk space are all you need, assuming any < 5 year old, non bare-bones CPU...

Honestly, the easiest way to stream your cataloged music, if to have it on a high quality USB disk, plug that into your DAC or streamer. Keep the music separate from your "computer" . This way you can upgrade the chain and not affect all other parts. You separate the OS from the data. 

That is what i would try as well. Remove all the music from the Nucleus, put it on a separate drive connected to the network, and see if all works fine. A 4 TB NAS drive is pretty cheap these days. 

I am a long time lover and sufferer of Roon. Reading most of the threads about Roon, I am pretty confident that there are multiple issues with Roon and moreover some of the issues arise out of the composition of your library. 

This is why one person suffers from performance freezes and another doesn’t, on the same hardware. 

Roon appears not to handle very large collections of streaming titles, and struggles when trying to identify unidentified albums like bootlegs, vinyl captures, and the like. It also seems not to like libraries that have lots of user tags. 

My Roon server is on a 6-core 3.9Ghz i5 11500 with 32MB RAM and a PCIE 4.0 SSD and Roon chokes itself to death about 1/4 of the time with some form of database or library processing.  It just grinds and grinds and grinds - CPU usage goes well above 100% -- until Roon loses its *** and loses connectivity for a second.  When it’s done, back to normal, but in the interim it’s paused the music, and sometimes logged out of Tidal and Qobuz. 

The differentiating feature among all users who have different issues or no issues is their library. That’s Roon’s database architecture and scheduled processes...sensitive to some library issues and not others!

This is where Rock and Roon Nucleus are at a disadvantage - the user can't see the resource abuse happening inside the box.