Well …

Posted May 23, 2025 18:20 UTC (Fri) by aphedges (subscriber, #171718)
In reply to: Well … by smurf
Parent article: Home Assistant deprecates the "core" and "supervised" installation modes

> it wastes memory and CPU

How does Docker waste memory and CPU? From my understanding, the overhead is quite low because it's just namespaces. I've never actually seen benchmarks to empirically test that, though.

Or maybe I misunderstood and you were talking about a VM wasting memory and CPU?

Well …

Posted May 24, 2025 15:46 UTC (Sat) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (5 responses)

Docker images have their own copy of the C library, the Python interpreter, et al.
It's not quite as bad as a VM which also has its own kernel, but on systems that don't have swap space I want to keep resource usage to a minimum.

Well …

Posted May 26, 2025 1:35 UTC (Mon) by aphedges (subscriber, #171718) [Link] (4 responses)

I don't run applications on tiny systems (I always have least have 2 GBs of RAM), but I don't think the duplicated libc and CPython matters much when everything else is taken into account.

Looking on Docker Hub, homeassistant/home-assistant:2025.5 for linux/amd64 has a "compressed size" of 626.41 MB, but a separate copy of the same distro and same Python version, python:3.13.3-alpine3.21, has a "compressed size" of only 15.89 MB.

This matches my experience that most of the size of a Python-based OCI image is taken up by Python libraries, not any of the core runtime or system utilities.

Well …

Posted May 26, 2025 8:27 UTC (Mon) by geert (subscriber, #98403) [Link] (3 responses)

> I don't run applications on tiny systems (I always have least have 2 GBs of RAM)

Do you need 2 GiB of RAM to monitor the house?

Well …

Posted May 26, 2025 8:48 UTC (Mon) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link] (1 responses)

That's not what they wrote. 2GiB is a tiny system, it is an absolute minimum of usable system. We are 1/4 into XXI century.

Well …

Posted May 26, 2025 22:31 UTC (Mon) by aphedges (subscriber, #171718) [Link]

I agree! I'm obviously not advocating for wasting RAM, but most systems you can purchase now are going to have 2 GB or more. It's just not worth limited developer time trying to shave a couple MB off that usage unless you are working at a large scale, which I doubt anyone is doing with Home Assistant.

The only exception I've seen to having these larger amounts of RAM is more special-purpose hardware like routers, but the OpenWRT One sells for a price comparable to standard consumer routers (at least in the US) and still has 1 GB of RAM.

Well …

Posted May 26, 2025 22:25 UTC (Mon) by aphedges (subscriber, #171718) [Link]

When I built my machine, I ended up deciding on 16 GB of RAM because the cost is only marginally higher than if I used a smaller amount of RAM. Plus, I wanted to run other applications on it and not worry about it upgrading hardware for years.

I expect that you won't find much in the way of general-purpose compute hardware with less than 2 GB of RAM. I was curious about how much is available on the Raspberry Pi 5, and the smallest version they sell has 2 GB.