HA is running slow

What do your Integration Startup times look like? (Settings - System - Repairs - 3 dots in upper right corner). That might show if one or more integrations are slowing things down.

When you hit that “Retry Now” login screen, have another browser tab open and point it to the HA Observer URL to see if it shows everything connected and healthy: http://homeassistant.local:4357/

Set up a continuous ping to one of your ESP devices and see if there are dropped packets:
ping ipaddress -t

What’s the signal strength when you look at the ESPHome logs?

I suspect this is more a WiFi issue than an HA issue. Try rebooting your router and any access points to see if the response improves, even if for just a short time before all of those WiFI devices reconnect.

Here are the start up times

It says it’s all good.

Home Assistant observer

Supervisor: Connected
Supported: Supported
Healthy: Healthy

I set up a ping for 2 minutes and there weren’t any dropped packets.

I have a Unifi system (UDM Pro with several access points). I rebooted the UDM Pro 5 days ago. That didn’t fix anything.

I wouldn’t think a WiFi issue is causing my “retry now” screen at login. The HA server and the computer I’m accessing it with are hardwired.

I’m also having issues viewing ESPHome logs. I click "logs on the device (any device) then click to connect wirelessly. I just get a black screen.

Yea, having both HA and your computer wired seems to rule out the WiFi side of things. When my ESP devices were going unavailable I could see the dropped ping replies, and power cycling my Unifi AP resolved it. My slowest integration startup time is about 21 seconds, but I’ve seen that vary by ± 25 seconds after any restart, so that doesn’t seem to be an issue.

What’s your default Logger level set to? Might want to set it to debug temporarily to see if anything unusual shows in the logs. Disabling all or most integrations and re-enabling one-by-one may be your best bet.

The ESPhome logs are now working, but they taking longer than usual to load. It takes 3-5 seconds before event the first two lines are shown.

INFO ESPHome 2023.12.5
INFO Reading configuration /config/esphome/motion_detector_board_1.yaml...

Is it possible to uninstall and reinstall ESPhome in HA without needing to re-add all my ESPhome devices?

I think you could do that (make a backup first!). Once you reinstall ESPHome it should pick up all of your ESP’s connected to your network and prompt you to configure them. I think you’ll need to copy/paste the api encryption key from each one to get them to re-join.

500 devices connected? Are those mostly via wifi? That sounds like a lot of traffic being sent to HA. You could look at your ESP code and see if you can reduce the update_intervals.

Take a look at the Glances Add-On. It shows network utilization and TCP connections.

I found my hardware specs if this helps. Any chance I just need a more powerful CPU?

ASRock Z590M motherboard
Intel i5-11600K CPU
16GB of DDR4 RAM
1TB SSD
Google Coral

500 may have been a high guess, although it’s probably in the ballpark. I have 71 ESPhome devices in HA, 106 TP-Link Kasa devices, 34 Google Cast devices, 19 Onvif Cameras, and several other integrations with 1-20 devices.

Here is the info from Glances. I’m not sure how to read this.


I see that Frigate is using a ton of CPU, but I have a Google Coral and I have the Frigate config setup to use the Coral

# Optional: Detectors configuration. Defaults to a single CPU detector
detectors:
  # Required: name of the detector
  coral:
    # Required: type of the detector
    # Valid values are 'edgetpu' (requires device property below) and 'cpu'.
    type: edgetpu
    # Optional: device name as defined here: https://coral.ai/docs/edgetpu/multiple-edgetpu/#using-the-tensorflow-lite-python-api
    device: pci

I appreciate the help!

For comparison, I’m running HA inside of Proxmox on an Intel NUC i5 running at 2GHz. My NIC shows 28 Kb receive per second while yours is 97.5Mb. My hassio shows 627 Kb transmit per second while yours is 85Mb. I only have 2 ESP devices and about 60 z-wave and zigbee devices. The other thing that stands out is your /config folder is 44.8 Gig and mine is 33.3 Mb. Take a look in that folder and see what file or folder is taking up all of that space.

Thanks! here is my config folder. Is it safe to delete the two highlighted files?

I also had 26.7GB in my config/www/plates folder where ALPR images were being stored. I deleted all of those.

Depends of what you are expecting. Deleting you sqllite ha database will certainly improve performance but you will loose your recorder, history, state, etc. data.

Your log file size on the other side should make you think. No doubt you have some serious misconfiguration in your system and your log probably contains lot’s of information how to tackle this down.

Also check out your recorder configuration (the docs explain this in detail) as it looks like you have a little too much recording going on inside ha (judging from a 17GB db file). For long term statistics you rather might want to check out a time series database like influxdb.

The .log file can’t be deleted as it’s the active logging file. It’s renamed to .log.1 at every restart. So you could delete that .log.1 file. It could be considered ‘large’ depending on how long HA was running before your last restart. You can open either one in Notepad and see what sort of events are being logged, and you can control the logger level by changing that value in configuration.yaml.

The .db file is your HA database file that contains all of your historical data. You would lose all of that if you delete it. I’m using the MariaDB Add-On instead, and my database size is 750MB keeping 7 days of history. 17GB sounds like a lot of history recording to me. You can control how long history is kept by using the purge_keep_days Recorder setting, as well as excluding entities that are filling that database with history that you don’t really require.

What does your HA NIC show for transmit and receive retries in Unifi network console? I would temporarily pause your camera streams and see if ESPHome starts responding quickly. I only have 2 camera feeds into HA just to provide a live view, and use Synology NAS to record everything. Wondering if 19 camera feeds are choking the NIC.

What is your Inference Speed in frigate? Might not sized/setup everything correctly?

I think I’m at the point where I want to delete my Database file to see if that fixes it. I was keeping 60 days worth of recorder data due to some automations I’m running (like tracking my irrigation water usage. I lowered that to 40 days for now.

Do I need to do anything special to delete that file? Or can I just delete it and restart HA?

I’d shutdown frigate and see if the problem goes away.

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Instead of deleting it you could try lowering the number of days being recorded and then use the purge and repack options in config.yaml (followed by a restart):

  purge_keep_days: 7
  auto_purge: true
  auto_repack: true

Another option would be to rename it in case you want to revert. Or just delete:

Frigate is using 388% of the 4 cores (400%). Not much left HA.

Head to the frigate pages and ask how to reduce it. I think it is related to the “detect” part of your cameras. You have quite a lot of them.

Edit: didnt see it was a i7, hence 8 cores. Still think frigate is the problem. Try and close frigate for a day and observe.

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I deleted my database file and turned off Frigate. HA feels faster after the database deletion. But I’m still getting the “Unable to connect to Home Assistant” screen when logging in. I usually need to click “Retry Now” 2-3 times.

Here is my Glance data since deleting the Database and stopping Frigate

I made some more progress on this. I narrowed it down to an issue with Nabu Casa. I only experience the slowness when using the Nabu Casa link. If I login using the local IP everything works perfectly. I’m working with Nabu Casa to troubleshoot.

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If you’re using the Nabu link inside your network, you’re essentially hair-pinning. Don’t do that. Use the internal name when you’re on your network.

I have had my suspision about this aswell