I have also found this to be the case… It does indeed take about 6-7 minutes for me to restart Home Assistant, but, I only restart it now once in a blue moon, because everything runs smoothly.
What allowed me to reduce the number of times I reboot is the fact that I have changed ALL of my automations over to using AppDaemon, by @aimc
AppDaemon allows me to create automations on the fly, without reloading Home Assistant. In fact, AppDaemon allows you to do more with Home Assistant by allowing automations that would be nearly impossible with Home Assistant’s automation system.
I no longer have a single automation, script or scene in Home Assistant, as all of them have been migrated over to AppDaemon.
In case you are curious, AppDaemon reads the live stream of events from Home Assistant, and thus allows you to interact with all changes to Home Assistant and in-turn, trigger services, events, etc back to Home Assistant. I make changes and click save, and instantly my devices are now using the new automation change I just saved, on the fly without a restart.
Forget a space in your YAML code in Home Assistant? Sorry, you have to reboot Home Assistant… make a typo in a word, like service: switch.trn.on instead of switch.turn_on??? Sorry, you have to reboot Home Assistant, but with AppDaemon? No problem, I fixed the mistake, hit save, and boom, instantly everything works.
For more info, checkout the GitHub for AppDaemon:
And look through the API to get a better understanding:
https://github.com/acockburn/appdaemon/blob/master/API.md