Brain Farts w/ Roon Nucleus

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. 

The operating system is the weak link with some equipment including Roon in my experience.  I have an Innuos Zen MK3 and switched the settings from Roon to the Innuos Sense app streaming Qobuz.  No issues.  Now able to use the Qobuz app still using the Innuos streamer.  

I am not an IT guy but sounds like it could be a lack of computing power.  It’s a power hungry program.  Placing it on their dedicated servers was supposed to be a fix but I suspect that the demands of upgraded software have outstripped the computing ability of these servers