# Roamio OTA is slow & buggy



## jakerome (Nov 29, 2002)

I just upgraded from the Premiere to the Roamio OTA. There are some major improvements, which are great. Lots of new graphics in the menus, which just is. And the responsiveness of the TiVo is just awful. It will often take a full minute for TiVo to display a list of episodes in a show folder. When an episode is selected, the description may take another 30 seconds. Netflix is timing out a couple times a week when launched. It's rebooted several times for no particular reason.

Never had these sorts of issues with the Premiere. Auto skip is great. The other improvements are fine, but I would trade them all in an instant just to get responsive menus. If it matters, hooked up to an indoor antenna that gets great reception, connected via WiFi and I use the RF keyboard remote from a few years back.


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## ThAbtO (Apr 6, 2000)

I do not think its the Roamio itself that is slow. Rather, the network, as it is constantly accessing through it.

Wifi is no exception. You should check the router on what Wifi channel it is set to. Interference is the enemy of the Wifi game. If your router has AUTO set for the Wifi channel, change it to either 1, 6, or 11. These has less interference. 11 would be the best. If your router is capable of 5G, enable it. Roamio can use it, but the Premiere cannot.


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## rdrrepair (Nov 24, 2006)

Hook a cable to your router and check responsiveness. My Roamio is quicker than my Premier.


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## krkaufman (Nov 25, 2003)

ThAbtO said:


> If your router has AUTO set for the Wifi channel, change it to either 1, 6, or 11. These has less interference. *11 would be the best.*


Not at all an absolute. Concur Re: 1, 6 or 11, but the best channel is the one with the weakest, or no, competing wireless signal -- entirely dependent on your proximity to other wireless networks. (You'll need some wireless scanning utility to evaluate wireless network congestion -- or just try each of the three channels and see if one improves performance.)

p.s. Ethernet or MoCA would be better yet.


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## JoeKustra (Dec 7, 2012)

jakerome said:


> I just upgraded from the Premiere to the Roamio OTA. There are some major improvements, which are great. Lots of new graphics in the menus, which just is. And the responsiveness of the TiVo is just awful. It will often take a full minute for TiVo to display a list of episodes in a show folder. When an episode is selected, the description may take another 30 seconds. Netflix is timing out a couple times a week when launched. It's rebooted several times for no particular reason.
> Never had these sorts of issues with the Premiere. Auto skip is great. The other improvements are fine, but I would trade them all in an instant just to get responsive menus. If it matters, hooked up to an indoor antenna that gets great reception, connected via WiFi and I use the RF keyboard remote from a few years back.


All those pretty graphics cost. The major cost is in networking. An almost major cost is processing. While the Roamio is faster, Hydra slows it down more than the classic UI you are used to with the Premiere. Internal wireless isn't so good, but should not affect performance on an average network. If your router supports 5GHz, use it. If it doesn't get a router that does.

If you have WiFi ability on a laptop or computer, get inSSIDer which can be found with Google, and check for a free channel. In my area channel 1 is always free. Better is 5GHz. I use channel 139, but you need to check if you live in an urban area.

You are not forced to keep that interface. You can roll back to the familiar non-graphic intensive UI with -> How to Rollback Hydra from Roamio and Mini's v1 which will really speed things up. Do it soon since you lose everything.


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## krkaufman (Nov 25, 2003)

JoeKustra said:


> While the Roamio is faster, Hydra slows it down more than the classic UI


Much like with some iterations of Windows, I find many of the menu animations in Hydra affect my perception of the UI's snappiness (though the OP's complaints seemed to go well beyond those aspects).


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## JoeKustra (Dec 7, 2012)

krkaufman said:


> Much like with some iterations of Windows, I find many of the menu animations in Hydra affect my perception of the UI's snappiness (though the OP's complaints seemed to go well beyond those aspects).


So true. When I get a new TiVo I know exactly what needs to be done to configure it to make me happy. When I get a new computer or a new version of Windows, I know exactly what needs to change so that it runs faster. I'm so old.


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## shwru980r (Jun 22, 2008)

jakerome said:


> I just upgraded from the Premiere to the Roamio OTA. There are some major improvements, which are great. Lots of new graphics in the menus, which just is. And the responsiveness of the TiVo is just awful. It will often take a full minute for TiVo to display a list of episodes in a show folder. When an episode is selected, the description may take another 30 seconds. Netflix is timing out a couple times a week when launched. It's rebooted several times for no particular reason.
> 
> Never had these sorts of issues with the Premiere. Auto skip is great. The other improvements are fine, but I would trade them all in an instant just to get responsive menus. If it matters, hooked up to an indoor antenna that gets great reception, connected via WiFi and I use the RF keyboard remote from a few years back.


With the premiere, you had an external wifi adaptor. The external wifi adaptors have better reception than the built-in wifi adaptor on the Roamio. The USB wireless adaptors won't work on a Roamio, but if you have the wireless n adaptor that plugs into the ethernet port on the Roamio, you could try that on the Roamio. Another option is to buy a wireless extender and position it between the Roamio and your router.


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## tampa8 (Jan 26, 2016)

The fact is over the last few days the blue circle of death is back at least for me. It is a server issue with Tivo not the Roamio itself. Without that external problem my OTA is fine and faster than the Premier was.


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## Furmaniac (Apr 3, 2018)

I have a roamio pro and it has gotten slower and slower as I add more and more to my wishlists and more and more to my hard drive. The processor in the roamio cannot handle all that. I unplugged my ethernet router and I still got blue spinning circles. It's the processor in the roamio, not the wi-fi. Delete wishlists and/or delete recorded programs and the Machine will get faster.


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## Sparky1234 (May 8, 2006)

Furmaniac said:


> I have a roamio pro and it has gotten slower and slower as I add more and more to my wishlists and more and more to my hard drive. The processor in the roamio cannot handle all that. I unplugged my ethernet router and I still got blue spinning circles. It's the processor in the roamio, not the wi-fi. Delete wishlists and/or delete recorded programs and the Machine will get faster.


I had a problem with a Cat 6 wire going bad which caused my Roamio to slow down.


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## HerronScott (Jan 1, 2002)

Furmaniac said:


> have a roamio pro and it has gotten slower and slower as I add more and more to my wishlists and more and more to my hard drive. The processor in the roamio cannot handle all that. I unplugged my ethernet router and I still got blue spinning circles. It's the processor in the roamio, not the wi-fi. Delete wishlists and/or delete recorded programs and the Machine will get faster.


No problems here with a Roamio Pro with 120 1P and 90%+ full so I don't think it's the drive space utilization or number of 1P. Maybe number of wishlists though since I only have 5 or so.

Scott


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## Barnstormer (Sep 23, 2015)

My Roamio is somewhat slow but acceptable. I delete shows I have watched, and my wish list is just 5 shows. I do not run Hydra on it.


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## trip1eX (Apr 2, 2005)

I am going to try some of these things. My experience on the Mini is slower than it has been. Click on a folder and it takes a few seconds for it to open. I'm getting a lot more of that slowness. Also Tivo is rebooting what seems like a 1-2 times per week now. And has been for months.


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## trip1eX (Apr 2, 2005)

I followed some of the tips here today. I opened up my Roamio Plus and took it outside and blew all the dust out. It was pretty dusty. Did the same to my Mini although nothing much came out of there. I guess I didn't think that you can maybe open one of those up. Anybody open up a Mini before? I'll have to take a second look.

I deleted a few handfuls of seasons passes that either aren't in use or were streaming season passes. 

I changed all season passes to show recordings only instead of streaming/recording. I also unchecked every box under User Preferences/Discovery Bar.

The thinking is the streaming stuff might be slowing it down and so tried to get rid of that stuff as much as possible. 

Initial results are promising: the Mini is much snappier than it has been. But who knows. It could be a placebo. And it's early yet. and probably rebooting the Mini helped.


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## krkaufman (Nov 25, 2003)

HerronScott said:


> No problems here with a Roamio Pro with 120 1P and 90%+ full so I don't think it's the drive space utilization or number of 1P.


What drive capacity? Stock 3TB or have you upgraded to something even larger?



trip1eX said:


> Also Tivo is rebooting what seems like a 1-2 times per week now.


Our Roamio Pros upgraded to 6TB and 8TB have been pretty unsteady, with hundreds of OnePasses and capacity utilization above 85%.


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## Mikeguy (Jul 28, 2005)

krkaufman said:


> Our Roamio Pros upgraded to 6TB and 8TB have been pretty *un*steady, with hundreds of OnePasses and capacity utilization above 85%.


_Un_steady? That would drive me buggy.


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## HerronScott (Jan 1, 2002)

krkaufman said:


> What drive capacity? Stock 3TB or have you upgraded to something even larger?


Factory 3TB but I did use MFSR on it to align the partitions.

Scott


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## Furmaniac (Apr 3, 2018)

HerronScott said:


> No problems here with a Roamio Pro with 120 1P and 90%+ full so I don't think it's the drive space utilization or number of 1P. Maybe number of wishlists though since I only have 5 or so.
> 
> Scott


I have over 120 very complex wishlists and every time I watch a program I put it in the title field with a minus so it won't show up again.
My wishlists are very numerous & filled and I think it has to go through a lot of logic to find out what to record & not to record & worse when there are loads of channels checked.


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## donnoh (Mar 7, 2008)

My Roamio Pro has been getting slower and slower over the past few months. Yesterday it took a couple of minutes to open a folder after I deleted 7 or 8 shows in a row. I've also noticed that the 30 second skip would be really lagging and take a couple of seconds to react at times. The hard drive is filled to about 50% where it has stayed for a couple of years, but I do have suggestions turned on so the hard drive stays filled and programs are cleared out on a regular basis.

I've decided it was time to do some maintenance on it so I'm going to swap out the hard drive with a new 4 TB WD NAS drive and clean out all of the dust I'm sure it's filled with. I hope that takes care of the slowness. I'm pretty sure it's not network related since it is connected to my Network through a MoCA adapter, but I'll soon find out.

I thought I bought this Roamio around 3 years ago and decided to look it up on Tivo.com. I discovered that I bought it in August 2013 right when the came out for a princely sum of $999.98 plus another $55 for tax so it has given me almost 5-1/2 years of trouble free service.


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## Furmaniac (Apr 3, 2018)

donnoh said:


> My Roamio Pro has been getting slower and slower over the past few months. Yesterday it took a couple of minutes to open a folder after I deleted 7 or 8 shows in a row. I've also noticed that the 30 second skip would be really lagging and take a couple of seconds to react at times. The hard drive is filled to about 50% where it has stayed for a couple of years, but I do have suggestions turned on so the hard drive stays filled and programs are cleared out on a regular basis.
> 
> I've decided it was time to do some maintenance on it so I'm going to swap out the hard drive with a new 4 TB WD NAS drive and clean out all of the dust I'm sure it's filled with. I hope that takes care of the slowness. I'm pretty sure it's not network related since it is connected to my Network through a MoCA adapter, but I'll soon find out.
> 
> I thought I bought this Roamio around 3 years ago and decided to look it up on Tivo.com. I discovered that I bought it in August 2013 right when the came out for a princely sum of $999.98 plus another $55 for tax so it has given me almost 5-1/2 years of trouble free service.


Since yours is slow too, do you have many wishlists designed as I do?


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