Brain Farts w/ Roon Nucleus

Prior to my present relatively sophisticated streaming setup I used a series of modified Mac Minis, the last ran just fine with Roon and huge library of rips and streams. I was running a stock cpu, both Core and Endpoint on the mini. I did have a quality network at that time, all wired, 1.5M longest LAN/ethernet cable, 500mb service at that time. So streamer nothing exceptional, network has always been optimized and stable since running Roon.

@sns providing an example of a well behaved Roon setup that is affordable is very valuable info. Thanks.  Also consistent with what I have read about Mac mini being a good choice for running Roon core/server.  Mac mini will be a step up from my current mini pc but guess what, even the mini PC fits the bill fairly well ( even with maxing out the CPU to some extent) so I am not in a rush.  

Hello HiFi Fans, It's me again.  it's the OP, no not the one from Mayberry.

Wanted to update you all on my progress.  First off, eventually I will go the Innuos route. All roads and counsel leads me there, but not just yet.  Purchased a new Degritter RCM on Thursday and that was a priority for me and my vinyl collection.

Spent some quality time in both our upper end Audio Stores here in town.  The first stop has a fella less HiFi and more computer.  We talked a good 45 minutes about the whole Roon scenario I am having and he had many suggestion.

@erik_squires  He did say they don't sell Roon Nucleus anymore.  They now build their own little NUC with a fan, faster everything and more up to date components. They will add the Roon software and get you up and running for less that 50% of a Roon Nucleus Titan.

We talked a lot about network issues.  Some thoughts on next steps there, if it comes to that.

We narrowed down the first step toward a solution as updating the Nucleus RAM.  So, I doubled the RAM and updated the RAM to a much faster model than what was in the old Nucleus.  Cost me all of $30 (on sale).  Easy Peasy fix, just needed to remove a few screws, get under to SSD and install.

So, I am up and running with the next step toward correcting my performance issue after changing Library>Background Audio Analysis Speed setting to Throttled, and doubling the RAM.

Only been a couple of days of playing thus far, so no real results to report.  But I'll let you all know what comes of these changes.

Thanks again for everyone who chimed in and continue the conversation.

Seems you've had some good advice. RAM is important with large libraries and Roon complex interface, I use enterprise level RAM in my custom server as  its extremely reliable and less prone to errors. I also run throttled here, no dsp, volume leveling as well.

I used to run Roon and HQPlayer on an old first-generation mac mini that I upgraded with SSDs and installed Ubuntu linux on. No issues with brain farts unless I used a compute-intensive HQP filter.

I recently bought an ASUS ROG with hefty Nvidia GPU. Again, I wiped Windows immediately and installed Ubuntu. No issues with performance at all, no matter who compute-intensive the HQP filters are. 

For Roon alone, compute and network duties are minimal. RAM and adequate disk space are all you need, assuming any < 5 year old, non bare-bones CPU...