Yes, it's been an agony... Made a lot of progress and the instability I am facing might be benign but I am trying hard to make the vera work... even without vera hardware. I am at a point of being reasonably happy with it.
I have a couple of suspicions about why luup reloaded after the nightly heal yesterday: I moved a couple of my motion sensors and they might have updated neighbor nodes lists or it is what I described below with the handling in particular of aeon devices automatically creating child devices even after they have been configured. Generally though, when this happens, the reload occurs during the zwave backup, not during the heal so it is more likely the former.
Some people go as far as rebooting the vera every day. it isn't acceptable to me because of the unpredictable times I am up in the house and how long the reload takes ( 35 - 45s and, almost 1m for a reboot) which are times all data is lost. Luup reloads should be acceptable only during setup and configurations (user induced).
Summary of Vera instabilities and solutions:
1. Memory leak and shortage:
Move plugins out of the vera and to openLuup to reduce the amount used
Upgraded lighttpd (actually available on the mios opkg repo) to address performance and potential memory leak
Extreme in my case, ran the vera luup engine on non vera hardware
2. NAND flash corruption and flash partition full
ExtRoot to an external flash drive, short term alternative is my script to use the storage partition for non-operating system folders.
Extreme in my case, ran the vera luup engine on non vera hardware
3. CPU and network socket crash/lockups
Move plugins to openLuup
which was recently updated to allow some delay in its communications to prevent overloading the vera socket
Killed the networkmonitor program running in the background.
4. mios server (outages and errors from the server can cause the vera to crash and reboot)
Killed all tunnels and services connecting the vera to mios servers except the event server which I have not yet been able to disable.
5. zwave network updates and errors
Disable auto configuration on every device after the device configuration has been completed.
I wish I could disable nightly heals but I still see some occasional auto heal I believe triggered by the zwave chip itself