Sounds similar to my setup (lots of MQTT and template sensors, zwavejs, cameras).
I guess this is getting a little offtopic here, but there is something I really don’t understand. A lot of people here on the forums mentioned how their startup times were very long on a Pi and their UX generally slow and unpleasant. They experienced a significant performance increase when switching to better hardware, as you clearly did too. I always assumed that these people had ridiculously complex setups, because I was never seeing problems like this on my installation. But there has to be another reason somewhere. Between my 17 seconds and your 5 minutes startup time… Could it really be the install method ? But what makes yours so slow then ? Unless your setup is about 18 times more complex than mine… Anyway, just curious and probably not the right place to discuss the details of this.
I think there must be a fundamental difference somewhere that would explain why some people have no issues running their HA on a Pi, while others struggle a lot.
I was working on the theory that it was the ridiculously huge database being read from the SD Card that was the impacting factor. Startup times were certainly better when I moved the database away from the SD Card to an external MariaDB server.
Oh your db was on the SD card. Yes, that would most likely be a very important factor. Will a current new default HA install still record all entities by default ? Because that is almost guaranteed to give new users a really bad first experience.
Yes, and it will likely be even worse now (in theory) with all the statistics stuff too. Although of course the database has gone through a number of changes since those days, so it may have had improvements to make things better.
Just to follow on from my previous comment about moving away from a RPi.
My original HA install was on a RPi3B with official power supply and high grade SD card (cant remember exactly but something like ‘extreme’). It ran well but would lock up every now and then and need a power cycle to sort it out. Eventually the SD card died and I put a new one in, but it always had a bit of a reliability issue.
Moving on I used a old Celeron NUC (ex store demo one I got cheap) and the experience was night and day. The only time I restarted HA was for updates. I was also trying to use the NUC for CCTV recording so upgraded to an i7 NUC once I got too many cameras for the Celeron. I later moved the cameras to a dedicated NVR so my HA is on a far over-spec’d machine, but hey, restarts are only a few seconds, so… winning.
Again, my HA only gets restarted for updates and is rock solid. I have a massive wifi network of iot devices, a heap of Z-Wave and a heap of Zigbee, all really stable.
What started out as a rant, has morphed into a very productive discussion about hardware options. Thanks to everyone who has contributed!
My good results on a RPi 3B+ could be heavily impacted by the fact that I’m ruthless about keeping the database I/O and size to a minimum. I exclude everything I can from Recorder, and keep long-term statistics in text files. Otherwise, it’s a plain vanilla HAOS install right out of the beginner “Getting Started” pages.
It does seem that Recorder is a weak spot in the HA architecture. There are options to use other databases, but as mentioned above, updating a live database remotely can impact reliability. It’s also not the sort of thing every user is going to be comfortable with. I’ve worked as a DBA myself, and am quite capable of making that change, but frankly I haven’t bothered.
I’ve seen lots of good ideas for improving Recorder, and even posted a feature request of my own, to allow retention periods to be set for each entity (feel free to up-vote if you agree!) Unfortunately this area doesn’t seem to be getting much love from developers. I think Recorder includes and excludes should be a prominent step in the “getting started” pages. Not doing so leads beginner HA users down a dangerous path.
Come on people, let the OP move ahead with his idea he had already made this mind, he was not looking for anyone to change his mind or help him, he just stopped by to say goodbye.
Goodbye @Bacon-Ranch , let us know your updates on Smartthings or whichever you picked.
On the other hand, if you were actually didn’t make your mind, please just ask in a proper way. Half of people here are trying to explain you about pros/cons of HomeAssistant, which might not be needed at all.
And now the RPi disconnects everyday from the ethernet connection and needs to be re booted.
Happening to me as well. Kinda curious as to why its been ignored for so long. HAOS doesn’t come anywhere near maxing out the Pi so it would otherwise be the perfect system to run it on.
I belive it was the history and log book jamming up the SD card, disabled those 2 and deleted the DB but still need to re boot several times per day, possibly a bad sd card about to fail? Z wave works better now after starting from scratch and re adding and configuring 60 devices, automations, et all
zwave is a PITA. I use it on my ISY not directly with HA, just for some things. My lights are mostly still insteon. Never thought I would have anything good to say about Insteon, until I started doing ZWave…
Something happened over christmas, not sure what but random devices stopped talking. Got a bunch of repeaters, recently got a zniffer and read up on v3…v5…v7 s0 and s2 security. Spent 3 days rebuilding my network over and over,moving repeaters around, finally stabalized again. But what a mess…
Just sayin, if all your issues are zwave related they may not be HA related, but good luck in your search for the zwave holy grail…
And bring zwave defenders into the arena joke aside some people are very happy with wifi, some with zigbee and some with zwave. As there are many external variables impacting the performance and variety of different level of expectations are bringing us into here
Honestly I had some problems early on and I would absolutely attribute it to the Pi. I had an SD card failure and that is when I decided to move to a more stable platform. I purchased a gigabyte brix j4125 mini computer added 16gb of ram, and a 256gb nvme. I setup debian and installed home assistant and I have never been happier. Super fast and zero issues. Setup did not take that long either.
he had already made this mind, he was not looking for anyone to change his mind or help him, he just stopped by to say goodbye.