Running on a Raspberry Pi4B with 2 Gigs of RAM, has been working fine for 4 years. I just added a bunch of add ons (Open AI, piper, whisper, wake on word) and now HA reboots if I try to browse its interface in a browser. If I’m on overview and click on Dev Tools for example, it might work but it will also every once in a while just reboot the system. My RAM is at 85% being used. Could that be it? Is it time to upgrade to a more powerful host computer? What do you guys recommend?
I think you answered your own question. 
But more specifically, those ard-ons are all pretty demanding and 2 gigs is kind of the minimum just for HA anymore. If you want to do more, a hardware upgrade is definitely needed.
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Cool Thanks.
I think I’ll be getting a NUC i3 with 8 gigs or RAM.
Will it be any faster if I go with 16 Gigs? 8 should be fine I think?
2GB is definitely too low for now-days HA with a “normal amount” of addons, extensions etc… At least 4, 8 will be ok. I have nuc with 16GB of ram and it only exceeded 8GB when i ran javascript which logs output of all my esphome modules to each one’s log file (for debugging). It came to just under 10.
With 16GB system won’t be any faster, though, as ram isn’t a condition for HA speed (that’s on CPU). But if you have Pi4 now you’ll experience huuuuge speed boost with any nuc
Many NUC’s have two slots for ram (if not all?), so perhaps now get one 8GB module and you can add one later if needed.
Good to know. Thanks.
I went with a Lenovo ThinkCentre M910Q Tiny Desk which has 32Gig or RAM with an Intel i7. So that should be plenty of power. It was only $220, so cheaper than the NUC. I feel like I’m becoming a pro now. 
Great buy. Cpu is similar to mine in skull canyon (my is 6770). Comparing to old pi thing will be superfast. During normal HA running my CPU is in order of few% (under 5). It rises when, say, compiling esphome, doing backup etc… but nowhere near 100%.
Yes, it’s total overkill. But, on the other hand having BMW with 500HP is also overkill, but people have it, buying ipad pro for browsing on the internet is total overkill, but people buy it… etc…
What’s good is that if/when you need processing power you have it. I used to have HA in VM on my Syno, which ran perfectly, but esphome compiling was like 3-5 times slower than on NUC. And since i tinker a lot with esphome modules my choice was obvious.
What d I need to install OS wise on this PC? Obviously I don’t want Windows. Should I install Linux?
I would say:
- HAOS bare metal
or - Proxmox VE since you have plenty of RAM which give you the options to install other services ASIDE of HA so they don’t impact HA instead of installing ON TOP of HA.
If you are interested for the latter, check Proxmox VE Helper-Scripts
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So is Proxmox a VE that runs on windows basically? Don’t I lose speed doing that?
No, it’s a virtualization platform which you install on your system.
Just read up on it to get to know it and see if it’s something for you.