It's the Roku OS and the apps. Not a hardware failure, but a time of use incremental deficit. Tedious uninstall/reinstall never a fix.
I noticed a remarkable decrease over time in the stability and usability of my 55S535 that I purchased in February of 2021 having v9.4.0. (BTW, I never expected its VA panel to be as awesome as it is! 48 zone local dimming does a really good job, too.)
It began with v10.0 in May 2021 and got worse with v10.5 in November 2021.
But with the arrival of v11.0 in May of this year, I have had to restart my TV more times to date than I've had to do for the entire period of use with v9 & v10. From rock solid to reset-city in about 15 months.
Since I bought the TV, the apps have, or course, received updates though I have not kept track of the versions. But that an update has arrived is evident by subtle or obvious changes in the "look and feel." For example, the latest HBO Max now has posters that expand to about three times their size when selected and then shrinks when you move to the next poster which expands and so on, the "improvement" being the same exact graphic and text, only larger. Over time, for all the apps, the improvements are more visuals and animations that download and render in real time. The Roku app Search, once a nice simple text listing that populated as one "typed" in a search, now populates with graphics and ellipsis truncated text instead. In navigating the Roku home or in an app, I often find myself hitting a cursor key more than once then realizing I was waiting on some visual to render or update.
There is a term for this: bloat. Bloat eats up resources and wrecks havoc on temporary caching where "leaks" occur which fragment memory spaces in RAM as the CPU tries to keep up with the GPU and vice versa. The kind of failures described in this topic ARE leaks, confirmed by the users here of the universal "fix" of a restart which clears/resets the cache with things being OK for a while, then they're not. A hardware problem would persist immediately after a restart.
In my case, the most egregious of the failures occur in Hulu, HBO Max and Disney+. Hulu gets me a full screen of green trash. The other two get me a black screen with forever animated dots and spinning pinwheel immediately after the HDR or Dolby notify. I can back out to the home screen and watch Netflix or YouTube TV and go back to either of the others for a repeat failure to play; network is OK, which is wired Ethernet. All "fixed" only by a restart, every time, all the time. Until they're unfixed again. Netflix and Prime are problematic, but not a bad as the others.
FYI: the Settings > System > Power > System Restart is all that's needed. The "secret hidden menu" or a complete power unplug works, but requires more work to do. With the latter, holding down the power button for 20 seconds will "drain" the RAM without having to wait 10-15 minutes before plugging it back in.
So, as our sets age, accept the restart as a routine. I wonder how much my TCL will suffer when the awaited v11.5 shows up. Or when HBO graphics will spin and pulsate.
As well, I foresee a time when my Roku TV will hardly keep up at all and by that time there should be a far more powerful Roku Ultra-whatever device to stuff into an HDMI port.
Cheers.
