Sorry, I could not resist at least one of those stupid end-of-the-world headlines so popular with with children disguided as adults who seem to dominate YouTube….So the very much abbreviated story is this: Months ago, I put Home Assistant on a cheap miniPC for speeding up my HAOS installation – a great improvement on my original Raspberry Pi 5 installation (it’s all in here somewhere).Performance increase was so good that I sold the RPi (broke my heart).
For reference, I use Chrome browser on Window 11 Pro – all up to date.Over a week ago, maybe more, I started to notice that when editing in HA on my Windows 11 PC, response was slowing down.Strangely YouTube seemed to fail every now and then but I put that down to broadband/power issues we’ve had for the last week or so.
I figured it must be something I added to my ever-expanding HA installation.But then by yesterday, just as the broadband/power issues had all but evaporated, I could not help but notice that editing in HA was becoming almost impossible – simply copying a tile to control another light – normally a quick job – duplicate the tile – change the entity with predictive help – done.But no – it was taking seconds to switch from UI to YAML mode – and as for HA guessing which entity I wanted – based on my first few characters – that dried up completely.
Despite all of that, HA seemed to be working normally.Suicide was one option – the very idea of backtracking through the many backups I’ve done and losing stuff I’ve not documented….utterly unthinkable.
I ran a diagnostic on my PC, it said all was well.I checked the mini-PC – could find nothing wrong.I even cleared my browser history forever in the Chrome browser – no difference.
I was getting desperate now.Went upstairs to try my wife’s old, rarely used PC, even that was MUCH faster than my PC at editing HA tiles.Inspired, I came back downstairs and tried EDGE browser on my PC.
Lo and behold – full speed HA.Wheeee… but why? I took the bold move of completely wiping Chrome from my PC and re-installing it.All was well and has stayed well all day.
YouTube is fine, HA is fine… I’ve been using PCs for decades and I’ve never seen anything like this – but the conclusion is inescapable….wayward Chrome plug-in?
So not the end of Home Assistant after all
