Brain Farts w/ Roon Nucleus

@kennymacc  Thanks for that. Some solace in not being an outlier in this issue.  I have two iPads, my phone and a desktop computer, and when I get the squirrelly Roon icon it is happened on all of them.  Wish it was isolated to one device, but sadly no.

@audphile1  Thank you for the suggestions.  I changed the Library>Background Audio Analysis Speed setting to Throttled.  I will do as you suggest, make one adjustment at a time to see if I can make some progress.

@erik_squires  I may not be Bill Gates, Paul Allen or an Apple Engineer, but I do know my way around a bit.  As I eluded to in the Original Post, I don't find Roon's user forum or help site very helpful, and as with most these day there a many options, toggles to choose from. Hence asking for help here.  I also don't think I need to lift the hood to have a Roon Nucleus without performance issues.

@phishhhhh4  I'm going to stop by a few audio dealers tomorrow and see what they have to say.  I don't think either of them are Innuos dealers though.

@mapman  @stijnv  My Roon Nucleus is the Roon Server (I believe that is the correct terminology).  I have the app on my iPad, phone and PC.  I don't run Roon off a Mac Mini or anything like that, as do many.

@boostedis  Thank You

@gkelly  I love you too!  I often don't react to ever post individually.  It helps to get the gamut of thoughts before react.

Thanks everyone.  This conservation has been helpful, and will continue to be as I navigate to a fix, be that a Titan, Innuos, or just a setting tweak.

This in a nutshell is why any device like this will be obsolete in a few years. Why you will need either an IT background, or know a IT person to keep these units running long term. 

You purchased a cheap computer, in a nice case, applied updates. Then your library has grown over time. This sounds like an indexing issue.

Any 1gb network will have 0 issue streaming music, you need around 5mb to stream hi-rez. Unless your network is not setup properly, it's not your network. 

CPU intensive? To stream music? Nope, it's not, it's disc intensive, buffer/ram Doing DAC is CPU intensive, but just the TCP/IP stream? Nope

Back to the disk, think if you have a big collection of music, you need a fast disk with good cashing, and error correction buffers. This will cost 2-3x over a cheap disk. 

Chances are the software has indexing jobs that run on some time table. These can make anything come to a stop. Yes, having more resources will help, but it is an entire system process. 

Yeah, having a shell open, seeing everything that is running, what is taking up resources.  https://www.unixtutorial.org/commands/top/

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. 

Or you get a NAS, learn about networking and QOS, mount that drive on your endpoint. My NAS failed (network card failed), just moved everything to an external disk. Simple, is always better.

My experience with Roon was similar to other users. It was great until Harmon bought it.  Within two months it had just about lost all reliable functionality. I got so frustrated I cancelled my subscription. 
 

I was hoping that going with a turnkey solution would guarantee functionality. If it doesn’t, I’ll be looking for a different solution.

@pgaulke60 i know you’re using a Nucleus as your Roon server, but they’re quite old and the specs not great. My point is that I suspect that a faster Roon server will probably perform better. 

When I was struggling with Roon and my Nucleus + Roon support advised me to install more memory...which I did....it did not solve my problems