Brain Farts w/ Roon Nucleus

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  

I've had the same issue with Roon for three years and don't believe its anything to do with the Nucleus. I have mine hardwired and have my Lumin P1 hardwired. The only conclusion I've arrived at is the Eero mesh system I use must be routing my laptop (which I use to control Roon) on one channel and the hardwired system is confused by this. I also have a hardwired ethernet connection cable that I can use on my laptop to have it, the nucleus and the Lumin all hardwired. It seems to happen less often this way but still is not rock solid, perfect 100% of the time. Annoying for sure which is why I keep a bluesound set up hooked up and attached to the Lumin too- when Roon acts up i switch over to the bluesound and stream into the Lumin. The bluesound is 100% reliable and always works. I gave up on the Roon forums- every question you post is answered with them wanting to know every single aspect of your devices, ip addresses, switches, etc - endless questions and they always blame it on your set up, not their software.