Home Assistant dashboard clock is delayed

[alphadogfpv]

Hi everyone - I wonder if anyone can help me resolve this. I’m a HA newbie so apologies if there is an obvious fix.

Updates from my ESPHome devices appear to come from the future! The dashboard often reports ‘last updated’ time ‘in 1 second’. Is there anyway to fix this?

I have read these:

Home Assistant "last changed" shows several seconds in the future

I’m curious if anyone else has seen this issue and knows what might be going on. For some reason whenever I toggle a light or some other entity that displays the “last changed” it shows several seconds in the future. Any ideas on what to look at or how to get things back in sync? This happens on my desktop in Chrome and on my phone (iOS app), and presumably any other device. I’m running the Home Assistant generic x86 image on an older Intel NUC. I am able to correct this for now by installing a…

Entity 'changed' time displays using local clock

Something that I’ve always found odd with HA is that the ‘changed’ time for an entity seems to use the clock from the client, not the server, so if there is any time drift between devices then it looks really weird from a user perspective… you change state for an entity and it says ‘in xx seconds’ which counts down, changes to ‘now’ then start to count up, ‘xx seconds ago’… Does anyone else experience this? - I seem to remember it ever since first using HA about 4 years back, and it seems odd t…

and tried the recommendations there but no help.

I have HA running on a VirtualBox VM under Win 11. Dashboard viewed in Chrome running on the same Win 11 pc

Taking the following steps still immediately gives ‘in 1 sec’ updates, so this does not feel like a time drift issue:

• ‘sync time now’ on Windows, even though already set to automatically sync
• start VirtualBox and HA (Virtual box claims to sync to host every 10 secs)
• run chrony add-on - which reported fixing a 0.002 sec skew
• restart ESP device (which is using time: platform: homeassistant)

Not very scientific but comparing the folowing 4 visually:

• ESP Time: scrolling log messages with time stamps (from UI on the ESPHome devices’ local webserver)
• Windows Time: the Windows clock on the host PC
• Internet time: a random ‘web clock’ (clockface online)
• HA UI Time: the clock card on the HA dashboard…

It definitely looks like the HA dashboard is a second or so behind all the others, which presumably would explain the issue if this is the same time source as the dashboard uses for its calculation of the age of an update?

Any suggestions?
Thank you

[tom_l]

Sync your pc/mobile device time. The one you are using the web browser or app on to view the dashboard.

[alphadogfpv]

@alphadogfpv

aking the following steps still immediately gives ‘in 1 sec’ updates, so this does not feel like a time drift issue:

• ‘sync time now’ on Windows, even though already set to automatically sync
• start VirtualBox and HA (Virtual box claims to sync to host every 10 secs)
• run chrony add-on - which reported fixing a 0.002 sec skew
• restart ESP device (which is using time: platform: homeassistant)

Hi Tom, thank you for quick response. Yes I tried that (first step above), but didn’t help. It definitely loks like the latency is with the HA dashboard clock.

[tom_l]

@alphadogfpv

Yes I tried that (first step above)

It wasn’t clear from your post if you were just referring to the windows machine the VM was running on (which is also a bad choice of OS for a server).

[Nick4 (Nick)]

Also, some systems allow you to change the interval to sync the clock and define the value (time difference) that is allowed to drift off.

W11 does not have such a feature by default.

[alphadogfpv]

Thanks for replying Nick. Just to be clear, the VM and Browser are running on the same win11 host. And within about 1 minute I synced Windows time, started VM (which syncs VM to Windows I believe) then synced HA with chrony (although I have tried without doing this too), then synced ESP device to HA. And immediately I get the issue, so I don’t believe it is ‘drift’ over time.

It definitely looks like the ‘slowest’ clock is HA dashboard, does it gets its time from HA server? Could there be > 1sec latency in that API?

[tom_l]

@alphadogfpv

It definitely looks like the ‘slowest’ clock is HA dashboard, does it gets its time from HA server?

No. The Web Browser gets the time from the system it is running on.

[alphadogfpv]

re: No. The Web Browser gets the time from the system it is running on.

ah OK. I manually moved the system clock forward and sure enough, after a hard page refresh and about 20 seconds the HA dashboard adopted my custom time. So did the other web clock I looked at, very similar behaviour.

However, the HA one was consistently a second behind, so there clearly is some latency somewhere in there - presumably in the HA web frontend - which does tie up to the issue of updates 1 sec in the future.

[tom_l]

Can you try a web browser that isn’t on the same machine as the VM?