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Brain Farts w/ Roon Nucleus

I have an original Roon Nucleus with a SSD drive in it.  Around 3GB of music.  Together with Tidal, Roon tells me that I have 2039 Artists, 4312 Albums, 61239 tracks, and 136 composers.  That is likely more than most users, but not as many as some of you, so I have read.
 

On a fairly regular basis, Roon has these brain farts moments, lasting 10-15 minutes, where I get the twirling Roon Icon and the system is shut down from playback.  It always eventually comes back. I don’t know the technical term, but I think it is a resort, reorganizing, re-something to the whole data base of music.  It always happens at the most inopportune time. Roon online forum has never come clean for me with an answer/fix.

I have revamped my Ethernet cabling and both the Roon Nucleus and the DAC/Streamer are mainlined, so I know it is not network drop outs.

I’ve read that others have had a similar problem, but never read a solution.  I have been looking into several angles to stop this.  (1) Upgrade to the Roon Nucleus Titan. (2) Checking out to see if some other Roon Ready Server is a better functioning piece of equipment, like the Innous.

I have two DACs/Servers in the house - BlueSound & dCS Lina - and they both have the same brain farts with Roon.  

I really like the functionality of Roon on the Nucleus.  My issue is not sound quality of Roon, it is the performance.  I must admit, that in all of my reading I have not been able to compare the functionality of a Roon Ready Innous vs. Roon Nucleus, or any other Streamer that folks mention here on the forum.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.  Thanks in advance.

pgaulke60

Showing 3 responses by erik_squires

erik_squires
16,917 posts
 

OP:  Yes indeed, micro PC's are cheap, some built on mobile CPUs offering exceptionally low power consumption.  

Personally I'd do the same.  Get a sub $300 micro PC, install Ubuntu and Roon on it and I'd be set for life. 

erik_squires
16,917 posts
 

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.  
 

Personally I think the CPU requirements for Roon core are somewhat exaggerated.  I run mine on an AMD 5600G and never have an issue.  Not sure how this compares to a Nucleus.  The CPU intense work, except during upgrades, is the DSP if you have it enabled as well as any conversions, especially from PCM to DSD.  

Otherwise I hardly ever see it use very much at all.  Of course that’s all relative. :) 

I understand that the OP doesn’t want to lift the hood... but that may be the least expensive option.  If the OP was able to run top or better yet, nmon, and watch what happens when it brain farts he may learn a lot.  

It could all be bad Roon.  Bad.  Or it could be a lot of other things like a bad drive or intermittent network which causes the system to stall.  

erik_squires
16,917 posts
 

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. 

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