How long does it take to update Home Assistant Core

Hi HA Community,

This forum along with HA docs has been very helpful for me to setup my HA OS on my Raspberry Pi 3b. Thanks to the HA developers and HA community.
I am a beginner on HA and was able to do most of my home automation setup. I realized when it comes time to update my HASS.IO, I find it very slow to update the core. I get better results with HASS.IO OS updates, which update within 20 minutes (like when I updated from 6.6 to version 7.0 recently). However I am worried about the long time it takes to update the core, so far it’s taking 40 minutes with a spinning circle and it has not completed.

Does this mean my older Raspberry PI 3b hardware is too slow for HASS.IO?

I don’t have much running, other than 8 Z-Wave devices, file editor, HACS, Konnected Alarm Panel, SAMBA Share, SSH Terminal, MPD and that’s about it.

Can anyone share what you are running HA on? and how long does it take to update HASS.IO, core, add-ons, running add-ons, how long it takes to restart your HA.

I’m running a PI3b+ with similar addons. With a backup… it’s usually about 20 minutes. A couple times my browser screen didn’t refresh and I found a Function-F5 cleared things up.

Hi, how big is your database and do you run any other addons which produce data? (Motioneyeos/videos, influxdb/database, etc…)

If yes, do you update with the “create backup” option?

Im going here into the backup taking you long before the backup actually starts.

I have a 1,6 Gig DB and have also some amount of data in influxdb. Backing up my HASS (with a final size of 3.5 Gb) takes approximately 50-60 minutes…

When I update, I create a manual backup before and then afterwards perform the update.

Update takes like 10-15 minutes not longer than that.

Restarting not longer than 3-5 minutes.

You can also check how long each integration is loading on start in the settings to see/determine which one is taking the longest to check if there is any issue.

Im running on raspberry pi 4 4gb.

Edit: after I posted I noticed you are running samba addon.
If you update with backup option enabled the samba addon share is backed up as well. Maybe you could start your investigation, if the upper applies, there :wink:

@ Dixey nice 20 minutes for a core update with backup is good. Hmm I’ll try F5 for a browser refresh on my next upgrade to see if it makes a difference.

For me to speed things up, I did a manual backup before the core update and it still took 50 min to complete. :confused:

@fraintt my database size is 327.6M


I have not yet used Motioneyeos/videos, influxdb/database on my RPI3b, worrying it may slow down the RPI3b even further. However I did play with Grafana w/Influx db and Motioneye addons on a separate HASS.IO test instance running on ProxMox.

I do not update with “create backup” like you I do a manual separate backup prior to the update and post update of the core hoping it speeds things up.

My full backup size is 90.8MB, partial is 74MB, restarting my HA takes about 10 minutes.

That’s nice your update takes 10-15 minutes without selecting “create backup”. I’ll take a further look at each of my integration startup in settings to see if anything is wrong.

Since you are running, Rasp PI4 w/4gb of ram, do you have your HASS OS on an microSD card or is it on SSD? I heard with the PI4 there’s an option to use SSD via USB.

According to this site my RPI3b+ is 1 gig ram and HA OS is running on 32gb microsd card.

That’s good to know the samba share is backed up if update with backup is chosen. Since I don’t choose backup with update, it doesn’t apply to me. :grinning:

My update took 5 min… maybe its your network or provider

← this could also cause huge performance issues.
I have burned 4 microSD Cards in 6 Months when starting with HomeAssistant.
Switched to an 1TB External USB 3.0 HDD and since then everything is fine and perfect.
I highly suggest you to migrate off of microSD.

Also as @Blacky suggested it could be cause by your Network/Internet Connection. Test your download speed while performing an Update to see if you can see a issue there.

@Blacky Wow 5 minutes that’s great. I am using RPI3b+ ethernet that is connected to 1gig switch. My Mac on the same connected switch (as the RPI) speed test gives me D:310Mbps, U344Mbps. Next time I do the update, I’ll monitor my Pi on my Synology Router which will give me device specific realtime speed test result.

@fraintt ok thanks for sharing about your microsd situation, I figured HA will do intensive read/write to microsd that it will wear it down sooner or later. Gladly for my RPI3b+ I found an article that an external HDD can be used via USB, however I am limited to RPI3b+ USB2.0 speeds and 1 gig RAM (not sure how much RAM HA uses for best performance)
Article- How to Boot Up Raspberry Pi 3 from External Hard Disk
When possible I’ll give bootable external USB HD a try and see if it makes a difference.

I have an update-

I had laying around a Inateck USB 3.0 SATA 2.5" enclosure and a Crucial 120GB SATA SSD drive. Flashed the latest RPI3 HA OS on SSD and the SSD boot worked on my RPI3 via USB! I migrated my data from Micro SD and did a HA core update to latest 12.5 and it completed in 6 minutes! Wow from 50 minutes (HA Core update) running on a Micro SD card to 6 minutes (HA Core update) running on a SSD drive… Amazing increase in performance!

I am good for now, but I know I will quickly outgrow this RPI3b+ w/1GB RAM.

Therefore I am selling my RPI3b+ and getting a RPI4b w/4GB RAM so I can run the high IOPS apps like Influx DB, Grafana, Node-RED and Motion Eye.

Thanks again for everyone’s help. :grin:

Pics of items used:

Crucial 120GB SSD Drive MX500

Inatech FE2002 SATA SSD 2.5" enclosure

The slow Micro SD card I had-
Screen Shot 2021-12-24 at 6.25.14 PM

Hey I also have extremely long load times when updating anything. I’m on a Raspberry Pi 3 and I only use 39% of my SD card. And I’m on 92% memory use and 12% processor use. Not using that much at the moment.
So if I want to instead use an external harddrive, do I just flash the HASSOS to the drive instead of the SD card using Balena Etcher? And the just plug the drive into a free USB slot on the Pi and start it up?

How do I during the new install use an backup so that I instant use my latest backup?

Just for reference a complete installation (not sure if this makes any difference) of Home Assistant Core including update of python, homebrew libraries, zwavejs2mqtt and all custom_components takes about 2.5 minutes on macOS (M1, venv).

Oh boy… It has been just over 1 hour now…
The Raspberry Pi 4 (4GB) with SSD still doesn’t respond to pings…

Wondering when I should “force reboot” the device to see if something happens…

Update: it failed because the configured system-wide DNS is not applied to the interface during the 2022.6.1 OS update. See this thread