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 1 response by mapman

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.