Excessive memory usage out of the box

[trbabb]

Describe the issue you are experiencing

I'm trying to get Home Assistant set up on a Raspberry Pi Zero W I have lying around, and I'm disappointed to find that HA is not able to run on a Zero out of the box due to memory requirements (the Pi Zero W has 512 MB).

It would be nice if it could run on a lightweight, low-power device like the Zero, since I really all I need it to do is do basic config and turn lights on and off. The Zero is also significantly cheaper ($15 vs. $60) than a full-blown Pi 4, so this requirement creates quite a significant price difference for getting started.

I loaded the HA image anyway to see what would happen, and sure enough processes started dropping due to OOM errors. Notably one of the processes was PulseAudio, which I can't imagine is needed to run a headless server like this. (And this suggests that maybe there are more things like this). (Also I don't have context, but I do wonder about the necessity of using Docker).

Has a pass been made to measure and reduce unnecessary memory usage? It seems like it could have a big return on the price and compatibility!

What operating system image do you use?

rpi-3

What version of Home Assistant Operating System is installed?

14.0 (?)

Did the problem occur after upgrading the Operating System?

No

Hardware details

Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W

Steps to reproduce the issue

• Flash HA onto a microSD card
• Insert into Pi Zero
• Boot, connect keyboard and screen
• Configure Wifi using the CLI; restart
• Wait a few tens of minutes, and watch OOM errors start to appear

(also: I was never able to see the web portal work before things started to blow up)

Anything in the Supervisor logs that might be useful for us?

[Unable to access portal]

Anything in the Host logs that might be useful for us?

[Unable to access portal]

System information

No response

Additional information

No response

[sairon]

Sorry, HAOS simply won't run on a device with 512 MB of memory in these days (which is also stated in the docs). The Docker is a building block of the whole OS architecture (you can learn about it more in the architecture repository), so it IS needed, to understand the context, refer again to the architecture repository.

If you want to reduce the memory usage to the bare minimum, use a distro with low memory footprint as a base and install only Home Assistant Core as a Python package with its dependencies - this is lowest you could possibly get. The whole point of Home Assistant Operating System is to make things simply, and discussion about doing it differently is out of scope of this repository.