Brain Farts w/ Roon Nucleus

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...

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. 

That is what i would try as well. Remove all the music from the Nucleus, put it on a separate drive connected to the network, and see if all works fine. A 4 TB NAS drive is pretty cheap these days. 

I am a long time lover and sufferer of Roon. Reading most of the threads about Roon, I am pretty confident that there are multiple issues with Roon and moreover some of the issues arise out of the composition of your library. 

This is why one person suffers from performance freezes and another doesn’t, on the same hardware. 

Roon appears not to handle very large collections of streaming titles, and struggles when trying to identify unidentified albums like bootlegs, vinyl captures, and the like. It also seems not to like libraries that have lots of user tags. 

My Roon server is on a 6-core 3.9Ghz i5 11500 with 32MB RAM and a PCIE 4.0 SSD and Roon chokes itself to death about 1/4 of the time with some form of database or library processing.  It just grinds and grinds and grinds - CPU usage goes well above 100% -- until Roon loses its *** and loses connectivity for a second.  When it’s done, back to normal, but in the interim it’s paused the music, and sometimes logged out of Tidal and Qobuz. 

The differentiating feature among all users who have different issues or no issues is their library. That’s Roon’s database architecture and scheduled processes...sensitive to some library issues and not others!

This is where Rock and Roon Nucleus are at a disadvantage - the user can't see the resource abuse happening inside the box. 

jji666

... I am pretty confident that there are multiple issues with Roon and moreover some of the issues arise out of the composition of your library ...

And that is exactly why I don’t use Roon. Although I enjoy working with computers and software, I don’t want my listening experience marred by computer software issues.

OP:  Yes indeed, micro PC's are cheap, some built on mobile CPUs offering exceptionally low power consumption.  

Personally I'd do the same.  Get a sub $300 micro PC, install Ubuntu and Roon on it and I'd be set for life.