Debian Issue

Installation
1

I’ve recently upgraded to a more powerful NUC so that I can go down the Debian route so that I can use the NUC for more than just HomeAssistant if I wish too in the future

Installation of Debian wasn’t the easiest as I’m new to Linux but it’s up and running and everything functions as it should. HomeAssistant is in a docker container as well as portainer and everything else is installed through the supervisor in HomeAssistant. I also have the Gnome GUI as I prefer a GUI.

The problem I am facing is with CPU usage. For some reason over a short period of time my CPU usage goes from basically nothing up to a constant about 14% which of course is generating more heat, noise and power usage than should be required. Please see the image which shows where it rises too and you can see where I restarted the NUC and how it goes back up slowly afterwards. (top is CPU usage, bottom ram)

Screenshot 2021-01-27 at 19.14.58

Using the top command it seems there are a few services that spike CPU usage

Most common is “python3” which spikes up to a maximum of 25.6% CPU usage
“gnome shell” spikes up to 13.3%
“networkmanager” spikes up to 15.3%
and occasionally “nmdb” spikes up to 8.3%

I hope some Linux guru here can help in identifying what’s going on and how to solve this CPU usage issue, I really don’t want to go back to just the HomeAssistant image on this NUC when it is clearly capable of so much more

2

So, you run Home Assistant Supervised or Home Assistant Container?

Well, 14% is not really a problem, especially as Linux reports up to 100% per CPU core. Python is the programming language of Home Assistant.

Linux gurus don‘t use a GUI :wink:

3

I’ve been looking into this more and more and actually found out what the issue is

avahi-daemon seems to be popping up using up 100% of cpu usage on 1 core

So this is clearly the issue I just now need to find out how to resolve it…

4

As a temporary solution I have stopped and disabled it:

sudo systemctl stop avahi-daemon.socket
sudo systemctl stop avahi-daemon.service

sudo systemctl disable avahi-daemon.socket
sudo systemctl disable avahi-daemon.service