Roon: anyone else experience slowdowns after usage?

You should describe your ROON setup in detail. Is is a headless setup. Is it on a computer? MAC, PC, appliance?

I had some performance issues with ROON and my PC when I had the client and server on the same machine. The cause was traced to my NVIDIA computer graphics driver. So if you describe your setup diagnostics can be attempted.

I use a headless Mac Mini for Roon and have to restart it probably once a month because it gets way to slow to use. My guess is that it’s probably related to memory usage, but have no idea how cure it besides the old standby, turn it off and turn it back on. 

Yesterday, I got my repaired MacMini with Catalina back (new OS and hard drive). I am going to installing ROON Core on it and run it like you are. Mainly because someone I am helping with ROON is using a MacBook Pro. I wanted to see what issues arise for him.

I will post my observations here.

@jji666-- FYI, I'm using Roon ROCK on a headless NUC. I do not experience the slowing problem you described. At least not yet -- the core has been running for 38 days now.

Thanks all.  I should have specified that my setup is Win 10 and it seems like this issue is mostly a Win 10 one, albeit I have seen other complaints of a similar issue on various Mac OS.  Everyone says that Rock seems to be more stable as are also the Roon appliances they sell.

The video driver thing is interesting.  Roon support wants me to update video drivers too. There are currently no issues with any video aspect of the Roon core PC, but I do acknowledge the possibility that Roon is especially sensitive to updated drivers, which I do find odd, in the sense that a video driver could somehow add slowness to an audio transition, or to the speed and function of a database, albeit the video driver could be some sort of indirect cause.  

For me the challenge is that as a builder of well over 100 PCs in my life, one has to learn to leave well enough alone - i.e. updating drivers on a working machine always leaves open the possibility of bricking the machine.  This is fairly new gear but it was never top end  - quad core AMD 3.6 running on-board AMD/Radeon graphics - and I recall that once I decided to add a more robust video card and updating the drivers to support that rendered the machine unbootable until a Safe-Mode miracle uninstalling the latest drivers and going back to the ones that came with the mobo saved the machine.  It works absolutely fine as is, so I'm not looking forward to a repeat.

That's the thing - seems like Roon should shouldn't be so sensitive to outdated video drivers - making Roon users thread the needle on their gear rather than making Roon work more reliably on reasonably modern and predictable platforms.  

There's crappy software all over -- on a different machine I've been struggling with the Asus RGB software and other services -- but that is free bloatware that comes with mobos and it's always bad.  Roon is expensive, and IMHO shouldn't be quite so finicky.  

So the core and app are on the same PC, or do you have a network in between?  What is that like?

For the core on the Windows 10 machine I use the full app that is core plus the interface.  There's no network in between that, obviously.  

I do have other remotes that are ios and Win 10 and there is a network between those. There's a 10G hop between two 10G switches and then each machine is plugged into a Gigabit port on one of the two switches.  So the network is certainly fast enough.

What I plan to do, because I don't want to just experiment with my Roon core and have it go down, is to build a backup -- probably with a way overbuilt machine (8 core Intel i7 or i9 with 32GB) and then go through the troubleshooting with the current core.  I don't want to have to do that  but if Roon is going to make me make my gear fit their software rather than their software fitting predicable gear, then it's the only way to assure continuous music while I troubleshoot!

BTW, I use Roon core on a Linux box with an A10 CPU.  I've never had any of the issues you are describing, so I want to suggest this problem is not wide spread, and a little patience could be helpful.

Do you have a very large music library?

My library is "medium" I guess, compared to many of the Roon forum posters.  About 8000 albums, 4000 local ripped CDs and 4000 combined from Tidal and Qobuz.

Not to be argumentative, but how would being patient help?  I'm not sure what you mean. 

What I was saying regarding my plan is that it's not my practice to disturb the delicate balance that Windows machines represent by updating drivers without a clear reason - just to see if it helps with an application.  So in order to update the drivers, first I need another core I can use if the driver update kills my A10 machine as it did last time I tried it.

@jji666  Do you have NVidia video drivers? If so, Windows OS updates may put the default Windows drivers instead of the third party NVidia drivers. When I ran the app and core on the same Windows 10 machine I had performance issues after a Windows OS update. I noticed that when I minimized the ROON app performance improved dramatically (looking at Performance Manager). So I figured out that it was a video driver issue and ROON a developer confirmed the NVidia driver issue.

Due to this video issue on OS updates I separated the full app to a CORE and APP on 2 machines. The separation is actually a rather difficult process and you need to follow the steps properly so as not to mess up you ROON setup.

My ROON server is not that powerful and also electrically noisy (ROON  says that is fine). I am a super user of ROON with 3 zones streaming at the same time with 2 of the zones using CONVOLUTION filters. My weakish CORE server has no problems. 

I also use fibre optic cables to kill the noise on my network before it goes into my DACs.