So I have a Pi 4 - 4GB with HA installed onto a USB SSD.
So far its been ok. But the more I add the more I’ve noticed that the default Lovelace dashboard starts to chug. Nothing custom added.
The smaller custom dashboards I’ve created per room seem much better.
I’m thinking if I’m getting into this properly I’d like a good solution to start with and grow with as I do more.
Right now I’m not doing much at all.
What would be a really good device for HA for longevity in mind?
Thinking a Intel NUC i3? Would this be a good solution?
Or an Odroid N2+?
The Home Assistant “Blue” appliance is based on Odroid N2+, so the makers of Home Assistant consider this being powerful enough.
I have one central x86 server in my home, that runs - among other tasks - Home Assistant. It’s based on the ASRock DeskMini A300 and equipped with an AMD Athlon 200GE APU, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD and 2x2TB HDD RAID1.
Plenty of power, not even close to significant load, small formfaktor and silent. Only “drawback” - it has no GPIO.
Probably, but I am not familiar with Intel CPU families, although I like the NUC housings. Tried to mimic that with my A300.
Main problem of single board computers like Raspberry Pi or ODroid is missing extensibility. If you hit the limits, there’s no way to shift them besides scaling among multiple instances.
I my experience, the performance of Lovelace dashboards does not have much to do with the HA device - Lovelace performance depends on the complexity of the view and of the performance of the device where you show the view. When a Lovelace view gets large (like the default dashboard tends to be) any setup tends to chug
That is my belief also.
Since the view is a webpage, when the page has been feed to the client then most of the load is gone from the server (HA).
I have honestly not looked at what the webpage is built with but I assume something like JavaScript or jQuery and plain html for the markup.
That should be quite light on the server.
Unless you have some mighty cards that use the server all the time.
I use an old i3 small form factor pc as my server. Runs with barely any load.
As for gpio, if this is something you miss, you can always set up an esp 32 or similar, the benefit is it can be anywhere, no requirement to wire sensors back to the server.
I have multiple around my house for integrating dumb sensors, temperature sensors etc.
I just upgraded from a Raspberry Pi 4 to an i3 NUC and couldn’t be happier. The setup was a little more challenging than the RPI but only because I was less familiar in setting up a NUC from bare metal.
Restarts are wicked fast, and response times seem near instant. Happy customer right here!
Sorry for hijacking the thread, but just a few days ago I have opend a somewhat related thread where I did some benchmarking of systems I had laying around. Here it is.
Maybe if others post their measured metrics, the results could be used as a general reference for others to decide which devices could be suitable platforms for their installation.
Nice thread thanks for that!
I’ll have a think for now. Might save some pennies and keep the RPi 4 for a bit longer with a view to upgrading in the near future.
Did same operation last summer and have been also really pleased with the end result. At least for me this seems to be the end-game. Homeassistant peaks cpu usage somewhere around 10-15% so it leaves headroom for other stuff also.
Power consumption and fanless operation is nice. Plus got i3 nuc used with ssd cheaper than new rpi3b+
