Well …

Posted May 26, 2025 1:35 UTC (Mon) by aphedges (subscriber, #171718)
In reply to: Well … by smurf
Parent article: Home Assistant deprecates the "core" and "supervised" installation modes

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.