Excessive GitHub Traffic - ~1 GB/week, HTML Requests to github.com
Summary
My Home Assistant Green is generating excessive traffic to github.com - approximately 1 GB per week and 3.9 GB over the past month, representing 52% of all network traffic from the device. The requests are fetching full HTML web pages, not using the GitHub API or git protocol.
Environment
- Hardware: Home Assistant Green
- OS: Home Assistant OS 17.3
- Core: 2026.5.4
- Supervisor: 2026.05.1
- Frontend: 20260429.3
- Installation type: Home Assistant OS
HACS
- HACS 2.0.5 (authenticated with GitHub token)
- 4 items installed: Mushroom, Bubble Card, mini-graph-card, Nest Protect (downloaded but not configured)
- HACS rate limit shows 4,992/5,000 remaining - HACS API usage is not the issue
Add-ons Installed
- ESPHome Device Builder
- File Editor
- Z-Wave JS
- Terminal & SSH
What I Observed
UniFi traffic breakdown for HA Green over 30 days:
- GitHub: 3.9 GB (52%)
- SSL/TLS: 2.9 GB (39%)
- Google APIs: 359.5 MB (5%)
UniFi traffic breakdown over 7 days:
- GitHub: 1.0 GB (56%)
- SSL/TLS: 706.7 MB (38%)
NextDNS query counts for github.com:
- Last 30 minutes: ~190
- Last 24 hours: ~10,400
- Last 7 days: ~42,771
- Last 30 days: ~43,316
Note: Nearly all 30-day queries occurred in the last 7 days, indicating this started recently.
curl confirms HTML responses:
HTTP/2 200
content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8
This is a full web page response, not a git protocol or API response. collector.github.com (GitHub's web analytics endpoint) is also being hit, which is only triggered by browser-like web page requests.
What I Ruled Out
- No GitHub URLs in any YAML config files (verified via grep)
- Traffic continues even with HACS completely disabled
- No REST sensors or command_line sensors referencing GitHub
- No automations or scripts referencing GitHub
- None of the installed add-ons make GitHub requests
- HACS GitHub API rate limit is virtually untouched (4,992/5,000 remaining)
- No active TCP connections to GitHub catchable via netstat during monitoring
Suspected Cause
HACS has "render_readme": true set for installed repositories in /config/.storage/hacs.repositories. This causes HACS to fetch actual GitHub web pages to render README content, which triggers full HTML responses and fires collector.github.com. This may be occurring more aggressively than expected, or persisting even when HACS is disabled because the custom component is still loaded by HA Core.
The Supervisor also performs hourly git fetches against 5 GitHub repositories (core, hassio-addons, ESPHome, Music Assistant, HACS addons). While these are expected, the volume suggests something may be fetching more frequently than the scheduled hourly interval.
Request
Has anyone else observed this level of GitHub traffic? Is the render_readme behavior in HACS known to generate this volume of requests? Is there a way to identify which specific process or component is making the HTML requests from within HAOS?
Any guidance appreciated.