Hello,
I am in a situation where the download and the compiling time of each ESPHome device is very slow: I recently reinstalled the entire system to Debian 12 bookworm 64-bit, Rpi 3b+, using this time the Home Assistant 64-bit version (raspberrypi3-64-homeassistant:2023.8.1) following precisely the guide for supervised installation (GitHub - home-assistant/supervised-installer: Installer for a generic Linux system) and meeting all the prerequisites, while before I was on a 32-bit Debian 11.
Now my system is much more responsive and works much better but I see a prolonged compilation time on ESPHome: before on the slow OS it was pretty quick the entire compile time for each device, but now it is more than an hour that it is running, but it is still running. The download itself is slow but I have seen the progress (the initial download was like 15 minutes before it was less than 5 minute) the compilation is also slow, every element (*.o) take more than one minute each to compile.
The CPU and memory look fine all the time:
# w
14:47:58 up 4:24, 2 users, load average: 0.96, 0.85, 0.83
USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT
XXXXXX
# free -h
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 953Mi 651Mi 41Mi 84Ki 323Mi 301Mi
Swap: 1.5Gi 525Mi 974Mi
Is it like a bug in the 64-bit I am using now?
Anyone can suggest where to look at?
Thank you in advance,
Michele
For all but the simplest of projects, I was never able to compile ESPHome YAML on my 3b+, it would just hard-crash it after a few minutes. I was running HAOS, so maybe your setup recognizes the performance issues and slows it all down so it doesn’t crash? Completely spit-balling… The slow download doesn’t make any sense though.
Does it? Looks like virtually no RAM is left and instead swapping (to sd card?) happens.
The CPU load looks “ok-ish”, maybe the default changed that Esphome only uses 1 cpu core now?
What usally comes with the change from 32-bit to 64bit is a higher memory usage for the same task. The Raspi 3’s only got 1GB anyways - depending on how demanding your HA installation is there is really little left for esphome.
Long story short: Install ESPHome on your client, it will compile in record time
Hi,
as I showed, my system is completely working normally, any slowdown on the whole system, just a very slow compilation. It is a pity there aren’t any timestamps on the compilation because I could say more
Still your system utilizes swap (over usb 2 ) for compiling which is something you want to avoid because it is very slowwwwwwwwwwwwwwww
Not sure, the settings (esphome ha addon) have a “compile process limit” but it doesn’t show what the default limit is actually.
The default compile process limit. This is the maximum number of simultaneous compile processes that ESPHome will run.
Not always, only if there is stuff to do for the CPU and it doesn’t need to wait for the memory bottleneck because no free RAM is available and using a SSD over USB 2 is magnitudes slower - so CPU sits and waits…
Beside a load average: 0.96 pretty much says that one core is utilized 96% if all other cores are idle
Hi orange-assistant,
I know about the few memory and it could be as you say if the system is running slow and not responsive and, maybe, the light of the disk always blinking because of the writing (swapping you guess) but it is not what is happening now, the disk became idle after a write and it is fast as never been before: I am telling this while the compilation is occurring right now in the meantime so there is no doubt in what I am writing and no guess.
Any advise?
Thank you in advance,
M.
People have noticed that trying to compile their projects on machine such as the Raspberry Pi 3 would crash either the whole machine or the ESPHome add-on, or Home Assistant. This is due to having less RAM and CPU power available to run all of the things at the same time. A new config option has been added as per the example below that should help to allow compiling on machines such as Raspberry Pi 3. By default ESPHome tries to compile using all of the processor cores, and this allows you to limit it to a lower amount.
So default is all cores, try to limit it to one core only to see if it behaves any better.
Okay,
maybe I understand what you mean, there are problems in the memory management of the 64-bit version so it runs like this and there is no other option for the Rpi 3b+?
Anyway, just to analyze it to the end, even the download process of ESPHome uses all this RAM that became 3 to 4 times slower than before? While downloading it is not compiling at the same time I guess.
The test I can do is to turn off all the other services and addons I am running (not much but they can free some memory) and see if it actually changes something in speed. I know it can remain the same situation.
I just stopped now the last compile because it was no more going on (any error but stopped).
I’ve added the line:
esphome:
...
compile_process_limit: 1
and cleaned the previous compilation just to start again from scratch.
It looks like it is back to the old speed, the download was a flash and extraction too, so I think that is enough to hope it’ll be able to finish, I’ll see.
Yes, it is running fine now and I must add that it is the first time I am able to compile and use the esp-idf framework instead of the usual Arduino With the previous installation, I never was able to compile due to an error in the compilation process.
That is good because it should run a better bluetooth proxy, without the random reboot.
) for compiling which is something you want to avoid because it is very slowwwwwwwwwwwwwwww 
With the previous installation, I never was able to compile due to an error in the compilation process.