Is there any downsides to running more than one instance of Home Assistant?
I’m currently running it on a Raspberry Pi, and sometimes the frontend seems to become really sluggish, and the only way to fix it is to restart Home Assistant.
So I’m wondering if I was to run more than one version (maybe switching to a couple of instances in Docker containers) would mean than if one of them became unresponsive then (hopefully) the other one would keep on running well enough to not have any Home Assistant downtime?
One possible problem I thought of is that multiple instances of Home Assistant might ‘spam’ motion/temperature sensors, Philips Hue hub etc. if they kept polling for information, sending requests to turn lights on etc. all at once.
Which pi are you using? I know everyone’s config is different, but I have had no sluggishness on a pi3 B. The only things I ever had to wait a few seconds for are the history and the check config button, and I mean literally just a few seconds. Everything else is lightning fast.
To be honest the problems are most likely my messing around/tinkering too much, and overloading it with lots of sensors and stuff than with Home Assistant itself.
But would be good to know if running more than one instance of HA would potentially cause problems.
It shouldn’t cause any issues depending on your setup.
I have 2 HA instances running - one on my RPi & one a NUC during the transition from the RPi. The issue will be if you have any specialized hardware (zigbee, zwave, MQTT). Duplicating that will be difficult or impossible.
I have main HA running in docker on dual i7 server with lots of memory. This is were automations and Zwave live. I use this as main interface. I may create additional instances here so I may have frontends with different access based on user(guest,admin,etc.)
I have (3) other instances running on RasPi. These have connected binary sensor or serve as cec connected node. These use mqtt to send states back to main ha instance.
I have seen no duplication errors with that setup and works extremely reliably. All state pages load faster since I run on beefier server as well.
I am a beginner with Home Assistant and with rebuilding my house I have had z wave modules put into all the light switches. Having had a rather slow set up with a pi3B running HA with the z wave I have put all the z wave onto a VeraPlus. Things seem to be running more responsively. I have a shed some way from the house in which I wanted to put some z wave modules into so I have run Cat5 to there and attached another pi3B with a z wave usb stick. I can now see each home assistant instance in separate web pages.
I understand I can get the two home assistant controllers to talk to eachother by using MQTT. I have installed the MQTT onto the “primary” pi3B (the one in the house that talks to the Vera). But I can’t find instructions on how to get the Home Assistant on the primary pi3B to pick up information from the secondary one in the shed and display it on it’s web page.
tmjpugh, you seem to have sorted this out. Any advice would be very helpful. Please don’t forget, I am a complete beginner!
Thanks very much.
Also. I recommend 2nd pi you just exposed all entity in UI so you have backup control but Main Pi should have the customized UI and hold all automations. Doing this way make your organization better vs trying to remember which config you put custom name or automation
do you have to change the port for 2nd instance? can you have 2 or even 3 instances running and all using port 8123? or does each instance need its own port?
If they are on the same machine then they need to use different ports. If they are on different machines that have different ip addresses then you can use the same port number.
