HA crashing - how to debug?

Installation
1

I am running Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi 5 (8GB RAM) on a 256 GB NVMe SSD.
I previously ran Home Assistant OS on it, but kept having outages and after some reading I assumed HAOS might be causing the issue. So last week I re-installed using Raspberry Pi OS, running HA Supervised on Docker (following the instructions from Homeassistant Supervised on Raspberry Pi 5.

The problem is even after the fresh install on RPiOS I keep having these outages, where HA just becomes unavailable, automation no longer run and I cannot open the UI anymore.

docker ps shows it being up:

ghcr.io/home-assistant/raspberrypi5-64-homeassistant:2025.4.4   "/init"                  6 days ago     Up About an hour                                                                                                                                           homeassistant

Running docker restart homeassistant brings it back.

I am wondering how to debug this to determine what might be causing these issues? I cannot see anything in the HA logs, and to be honest I am not sure where to find system logs outside of HA. Can someone point me in the right direction?

2

SD card fail ?
Power supply issue?

Replace SD and cut back on logging(database writes)

3

How to Troubleshoot Raspberry Pi Crashing.

4

Not using an SD card, it’s an NVMe. When moving from HAOS to RPiOS I also swapped SSDs to rule out an issue with it.
Power supply was my first thought as well, I swapped it and installed the Raspberry Pi Power Supply Checker addon, which shows the status as OK at all times.

5

After the crash the home-assistant.log.1 file contains the log from before the previous boot.

Also install System Monitor and keep an eye on your system resources:

You could be running out of memory due to a leaky 3rd party integration or a script/automation loop that never exits.

Try starting in Safe Mode. This disables all third party integrations. See if it is more stable.

1 Like
6

I have system monitor running, but I never get over 30% memory usage and everything else also looks quite healthy.

Where can I find the log.1 file?

7

in your /config folder.

1 Like
8

I kept an eye on this a bit more over the last day and noticed that the Swap memory is filling up to 100%, but the RAM remains at a max utilisation of around 30%.

Any ideas what might be causing this?

9

It’s just how Linux works. Nothing to be worried about there.