Sorry, I could not resist at least one of those stupid end-of-the-world headlines so popular with children disguised 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, when making changes to Home Assistant, 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 🙂