Roon isn't stable and they edit their forum to hide it

I've been using Roon since 2017 and I have a lot of experience with it. I've built maybe 10 different Roon servers/cores, possibly more.  Some Windows 10/11, some Ubuntu.  I don't know MacOS well enough to try my hand at that.  

In the end, what I've done is build 2 cores and I can switch between them when one is running the process that effectively kills Roon.

I certainly understand that many people don't have the same issues.  My take on this, after a ton of experience and communications with other users having similar problems, is that it's a metadata/database update process.  It's not network or hardware configuration.  

Why does it only affect some people?  I suspect it has to do with library composition - use of Roon's tags, and unidentified albums could be culprits.  

The main issue with this instability is that Roon uses only one core for this process and it maxes out the core and makes Roon slow to unresponsive and it then ultimately restarts itself, which of course interrupts the music.  That restart doesn't reset Roon to functional - the problem continues until the process is done. 

Anyway, that's what I was referring to.

In terms of the forum, I've had posts edited to leave positive comments and remove negative...and lately just deleting negative posts. 

This is not to say I don't love the product.  Well, it's a love-frustration thing anyway.  But I haven't found anything better.  I just wish Roon would code away from this architecture that does this.  

I agree Roon's support model is not geared towards quick response and it's under-resourced.  That may change over time with their acquisition.  I've tried to use it multiple times but their support ideas always revolve around stripping down the network and stripping down the library.  That's significant work...I can see the logic, but that's not seemed to help anyway.

Plus these problems seem to propagate with new releases...fix a problem once and then a similar one pops a few months later. 

I get the sense that, as above, the product is so complex they can't really tell what's going on either. 

My OP was more about the locking down of the Roon forum than the product albeit the product drives the comments on the forum. Roon itself is a mixed experience with extreme highs and lows. 

Thanks.  I agree it's a very complex and sophisticated product, and in many senses that is what attracts me to it.  I tend to adopt something and use it very deeply, which I'm sure stresses areas other users don't touch or stress.

To be clear, my point was not to bash the product per se albeit certainly that was the origin of why I was posting on the Roon forum as I was.  It was simply that Roon heavily moderates and sometimes edits posts and so I couldn't say it there.  The actual post was someone saying that they hope it isn't months before their issue is fixed, and my response is that for some issues it's been years and not months. 

All of that said, I feel I've vented enough. Thanks for the open forum for me to get that out of my system. Now, back to my dual servers...

Oh yeah, no question, all of these machines have been high powered. At least 6-8 cores and at least 3.6 - 3.8 Ghz base speed, i7 or i9 or AMD "equivalent," and PCIe 4.0 M2 system drives.

To me the issues seem library / database based - in the sense of there’s something in the library that causes Roon to go off the rails on processor power at various times. As above, two possible culprits is high use of Roon Tags (which I do) and having unidentified albums (I have maybe 500). The process of identifying albums in Roon is really cumbersome, and for many it’s just impossible anyway.

Yes I understand that most users don't have this issue.  As mentioned I think there have to be some uses of the database/library functions that aren't commonly used, at least to the level that I and others who have similar problems have used them. 

And if you are only streaming or have a very small local library, you are not likely to have a significant amount of unidentified albums, which Roon seems to be constantly trying to remedy, but with futility. 

Anyway, I'm glad that Roon works well for many.  And it works well for me 80% of the time.  It just so happens that other 20% seems to be when I really want to listen, and thus, 2 servers, severely reducing the likelihood of both servers being borked at the same time. Plus I just enjoy building these machines. 

But to be clear, there is nothing weird about my network, or the machines the cores are running on.  One is a clean Ubuntu server install with nothing else running. The other is currently a Win10 machine that has very little else running (i.e. I'll pop a browser to use the chromecast display function and show the artist photo). 

As above, my complaint is more about the forum than it is the product. 

This is what I find so mystifying.  There isn't anything different about my Roon usage other than pushing it harder - 3 grouped zones, 3-4 remotes running, 11K albums, 152K tracks.  Lots of Roon Tags and 500 or so unidentified albums.

So as far as I can tell the only difference would be the volume of usage, the size of the library (which isn't that unusual), the number of Tags. 

Anyway, I probably should have switched around the title of this thread, which would be that the Roon forum is moderated to tone down discussion of stability issues.  I do understand that many use it without it being unstable.  Just keep your use moderate! 

I suspect OP has some kind of OS issues causing conflict.

I have cores on both Windows 10 and Ubuntu Server. All Roon cores are dedicated and run nothing else material.

Thanks I am trying throttled. We’ll see if that helps.

It does bring up another point about the Roon software, however, which is that its error messages are generally not helpful in troubleshooting. One message I see when Roon is having this problem is "media is loading slowly" - well it may be loading slowly because a Roon process is killing the software’s responsiveness - i.e. it is a local file on a HDD in the server. How could it be loading slowly other than because Roon is killing itself?

I honestly think that library composition and use of various things like Roon Tags has a lot to do with this. That would explain why problems follow from server to server.  Roon should deal better with unidentified albums, for example. 

I'm not entirely sure that whatever issues I've experienced are even triggered locally.  It is true that the issues are similar to other users who hypothesize that it's some form of library/metadata update. 

That issue was happening quite frequently, as in every 2-3 days for about an hour at a time, and restarting the software or rebooting the server did nothing...the process simply restarted and killed Roon again after that. 

But I haven't seen the issue in maybe 10 days.  This makes no sense if the Roon core initiates some process on a fixed schedule (nothing I have done - haven't added anything to the library or modified anything).  

So I wonder if this is something on the Roon network end...it triggers a process.  So perhaps Roon has addressed it on their end somehow.

Amazing how many different types of issues Roon spews out.  

It is spectacular when it works.  It is incredibly frustrating when it doesn't.  And I feel like we are just guessing at what the problems may be...about as scientific as a Neanderthal wondering why the volcano just erupted.