Brain Farts w/ Roon Nucleus

Just an observation, INNUOS has both Tidal and Qobuz connect. It completely removes the need for roon. No longer is there a need for using the proprietary app(Sense) from the streaming manufacturer. unlike blue sound you have to use their BluOs app to get Tidal. Just open up the Tidal app and start playing music. Good luck on your future upgrade if you go with INNUOS like me and many others have enjoyed it immensely!

I have a Roon Nucleus Plus with 4 GB.  All I can tell you is, you’re not alone.  Roon does have some annoying little glitches that, because I love Roon’s functionality so very much, they’re something that I have learned to settle in with and live with.  There seems to be no cure for the glitches and there seems to be nothing I can do to totally eliminate them.  It’s kinda like a love-hate relationship, but not even that serious.  I run a Hegel integrated amp with an Ayer Acoustics QX-5 Twenty Streaming DAC, switch, ethernet cables, etc.  The main glitch that I have experienced l in my audio system with Roon is it freezing.  I mean, it freezes my remote, or iPad, to where it will not respond when I push a button on it to stop the music, pause, play, etc.  When this issue occurs, sometime all I have to do is press the Roon icon on my iPad for it to re-set and go back to normal, and if that doesn’t work, I have to actually power-down my iPad, power it back up, and everything will re-set and go back to normal operations.  All of this only takes a couple minutes or so, so it's not too bad.  During some listening sessions, this issue may never occur, and then at other times, it may occur a couple times during an extended listening session.  After about four years of dealing with these minor issues that I call "HICCUPS,"  I’ve gotten used to them and have learned to cope with them, as they do not detract from the just incredible, overall listening experience that I get with my Roon Nucleus Plus in place.  Happy listening..      

I would suggest the following 

In Roon settings go to Library tab and check your settings for Background Audio Analysis Speed (mine is set to Throttled) and On-Demand Audio Analysis Speed (mine is set to Off). 
 

Try same settings as I have. Or even set the Background audio analysis speed to Off. see if the issue goes away. 
Also try to disable any DSP. Do the changes one at a time.  

The OP is probably not very technically savvy, but if he were I'd encourage him to open up a shell to his Nucleus and leave top running.  See what takes time when things slow down, and how much RAM is being consumed.  

Also, be aware that solid state drives can and DO fail, sometimes without warning.  Well, the signs are there if you know how to look at the S.M.A.R.T. disk stats but unfortunately few of us ever do and it's only when a system starts to misbehave that we wonder what's going on.   Your symptoms may be more related to a disk being bad than anything else, but hard to tell without checking.  

Make sure you have a solid backup of all your music. 

I read about these issues from time to time and though I've been a Roon user for quite a few years, I must say that I have never once had this happen. If I can't connect to my Roon server then I know I need to reboot my router. That's the problem 100% of the time. For me, that is, I'm sure that's not the answer to the OP's issues.

I think audphile 1 has some good suggestions to try. Also, if you've never seen this, there may be something buried here that could help; https://www.head-fi.org/threads/roon-optimization-guide-for-increased-sound-quality.968792/

My experience with Roon (the company) and it's Nucleus + was a nightmare.

A terrible company with easily the worst support model for a product that users pay for.

Thankfully I found Innuos Sense.

Zero issues and the company provides top notch support if it is needed.

I've had Innuos engineered log into my system and fix/tweak things within 3 days of issue being reported.

It all amounts to me as ...

Work to get off Room. 

You will be happier

To actually answer one of your questions ..

I find Innuos Sense as functional as Roon in every way -cept maybe artist/bio stuff

A few tidbits to offer.  
 

1) throttling the background processing as suggested helps reserve processing power for other tasks so that is a good idea. 
 

2) sometimes the Roon endpoint not Roon itself can become the bottleneck, for example when many tracks are in the queue.  Displaying the queue contents can lock up the Roon controller for a time while displaying initially.  
Also my Cambridge Audio streamers sometimes take a long time to start playing a track with many tracks in the Roon device’s queue.  A restart of the streamer device usually clears that.  I often queue up thousands of tracks randomly so I do ask a lot of Roon and my streamers  there. 
 

Yes Roon isn’t perfect but I find the benefits far outweigh the disadvantages. 
 

Roon can be very CPU intensive.  I run it on a very modest powered device that works well but often bottlenecks on CPU.  Will likely move to a faster device with more CPU horsepower at some point.  
 

Next time Roon hangs up,  check the system resource monitor on your OS to see where the bottleneck is.  Most likely CPU and maybe network bandwidth in some cases with Roon core/server from what I have seen personally.

With windows deactivating unneeded os services can go a long way.  
 

Also avoid running other cpu intensive programs on your Roon server.  For example Google Chrome and other browsers can be a resource hog as well especially if one allows many cookies to collect and suck up cpu resources. 

Honestly one shouldn’t expect great performance from an old computer. I upgraded from a ROCK with a NUC 7i5 to a NUC 13i7 + much more RAM and it has become a lot snappier. 

I know that Roon always says the hardware specs don’t matter that much, but in my experience, while both NUCs work, the difference was very much notable.