By the way, I am using a ZeroW with a 4 port Ethernet USB dongle to cable to a X10 CM15. I had the standard Pi power supply connected to a dedicated APC 550 Backup UPS. Last week, to try to eliminate the PS as a problem, I swapped out the PS with a third party 2.5 amp version. I let it run for this last week and I saw no difference in the PiHub performance so assume the old PS was not contributing to my HG problems.
While I had reused my backup SD to burn an All Pi image, what I did have was a set of IMG files I had made from late Dec 2019 thru 9 Jan 2020. Was making incremental changes in HG and then making a backup before trying something new. Then we went on holiday and the next backup of anything other than configbackups was June 2020. So I burned an SD with with the 9 Jan 2020 IMG.
This was the version I had PiHub running for months until I decided this last week to grab the string of June 2020 HomeGenie updates. But I knew there were problems with this 9 Jan version as it was the one that ate up free memory like it was the cookie monster.
Every day on holiday I would remotely fire up HG on my laptop to focus on the Status widget's MemFree. If it got below 80Mb, I would run Tuicemen's Memory Cleaner and it would eventually show over 200Mb. What I did not know, and still do not know, is why it was eating memory. I would remotely run PuTTY and list with "top -o %MEM". Would scroll down to the items that listed zero memory use, grab the list of those with usage, and enter them into a spreadsheet. Memory total would never show over 35%-40% including Terminal when using PuTTY. But in the header after running tops it did show the same free memory amount that the Status widget showed. After I came home from holiday, I let the system run down on free memory. That last I remember seeing was something south of 15Mb because the next time I tried to check I could not open HG in a browser. It was froze. I could run PuTTY and I used it to sudo shutdown the Pi. In my panic, I did not run "top". Went directly to shutdown, checked the SD on my laptop. I could read the SD. Put it back in the Pi and fired it up. It ran just find with initially over 230Mb free memory.
After I upgraded to HG stable.13...from stable.4, that was when things really went downhill. What I know as of this morning was sometime after the HG update, OpenWeatherMap would run and then die. That is why WeatherAlerter would update date/time but none of the meteorological information. If I restarted OpenWeatherMap, it would update the WeatherAlerter widget for one single cycle and then stop.
Last evening, I burned and SD with the 9 Jan 2020 IMG. WeatherAlerter and OpenWeatherMap played nice together. But I still had the memory being eaten in chunks. I let it run overnight. This morning it showed less than 42Mb free. But everything played nice.
That 9 Jan 2020 IMG was the last one with my pre-holiday final X10 Schedule and other settings. Hated to see that one go away but decided to burn an SD with the 2 Jan 2020 IMG, swapped out the 9 Jan SD, and painstakingly updated the Schedule and settings. Free Memory does diminish some but eventually will rise. Had not seen that happen in months.
This 2 Jan image is Buster version 10 (has to be release 2019-09-26) and HG stable.4 or at least is says stable.5 thru stable.14 are available for updates.
Everything in my programs and X10 Modules that are scheduled to start/stop each morning has been accomplished. Everything is still playing nice with each other. Have taken all kinds of readings via PuTTY and downloaded the logs. I am going to shutdown the PiHub in a few minutes and make an image backup onto a backup SD card. I will store the SD that is running now and will run on the backup SD until I see it is functional and all the setting and programs run as expected.
If I make no changes in the next 24 hours, I will start the process of updating Pi OS and HG. I presume that is the proper order. Pi OS last update shows on Wiki as still Buster version 10 but is release 2020-02-13.
Thanks for the advice Petera about just going back in time and finding a known good configuration. I have temporarily abandoned preparing the AllPi image as there is something that I am not doing correctly when importing TuicemenTools programs and widgets that includes WeatherAlerter and DuckDNS. Neither of the widgets are showing correctly during the configuration stage even after restarting HG or rebooting the PiHub. WeatherAlerter's widget keeps getting dumped into homegenie/generic/unknown. DuckDNS shows a bunch of miscellaneous text written across the widget. I am sure there is something I am not doing as these items were part of previous Tuicemen images which worked quite well. But that is a project for a later time. I need to take a break and let this old Buster and HG run.
Last check showed over 200Mb of FreeMemory. What a joy to behold.