Comments on: Virtualizing Roon Server

By: John Reekie

John Reekie — Sat, 21 Dec 2019 11:54:17 +0000

The latest article may help (although using Proxmox, it’s KVM under the hood) – https://www.hifizine.com/2019/12/virtualizing-roon-rock/

By: John Reekie

John Reekie — Fri, 13 Dec 2019 19:25:40 +0000

Hi, you need to use USB passthrough to attach a physical keyboard to the Rock VM.

By: Casper

Casper — Wed, 11 Dec 2019 16:26:19 +0000

Hi,

I’m having a problme installing Roon Rock on either KVM or VMware. When it get’s to the menu where I have to choose to install it no longer takes keyboard input. I’ve tried with multiple different VNC clients (in addition to virt-manager / vmware console).

Anyone seen that?

Cheers,
Casper

By: John Reekie

John Reekie — Mon, 02 Dec 2019 21:05:22 +0000

The NUC gets very hot and bothered when I do that 🙂

By: Jacques Distler

Jacques Distler — Mon, 02 Dec 2019 17:43:15 +0000

“Cool, you are ahead of me on configuring Netdata, I’m still on the out-of-the-box settings ”

Not by much .

Another experiment: adding an album.

The default setting for “Background Audio Analysis Speed” is “Throttled”. This chews up ~35% of a core on the H2. Unfortunately, it’s also reeeeeeaaaaly sloooooooow. Changing the setting to “Fast (3 cores)” causes the temperature (which is usually around 39℃ on the passively-cooled H2) to rise to 66℃, as the CPU usage jumps to 240% of a core. But it’s also really fast: by the time I had checked the temperature and returned to look at the CPU usage, it had finished processing the album.

By: John Reekie

John Reekie — Mon, 02 Dec 2019 10:33:41 +0000

Cool, you are ahead of me on configuring Netdata, I’m still on the out-of-the-box settings 🙂 My guess on the “spikiness” is that perhaps Netdata is sampling the load of the VM at a lower rate? I assume this is configurable but haven’t looked into it. There is a display setting for bezier smoothing but I don’t think that’s it.

By: Jacques Distler

Jacques Distler — Mon, 02 Dec 2019 00:23:05 +0000

Netdata is a great tool! I decided to give it a whirl and see if I could reproduce some of your results.

Per the netdata instructions, I did a

sudo /etc/netdata/edit-config apps_groups.conf

added this line

roon: *Roon* *RAAT* *ffmpeg*

and restarted netdata. With Volume-leveling, but no other DSP active, Roon takes up ~6% of a core on the H2. There’s a brief spike to ~26% at the start of each track (and smaller spikes at random other times), but those last less than a second. Doing searches, calling up metadata on artists and albums, … none of those things seem to lead to a significant spike in CPU usage.

For comparison, netdata and its plugins take up about 4% of a core — not negligible compared to Roon. Since I run roon as a non-root user, I can get the same information by monitoring the CPU usage by user.

Total usage is about 12%. A little less than you found, but not by much.

One thing puzzles me: my graphs are a lot ‘spikier’ than yours. Is there a “smoothing” setting that I’ve missed?