Hi All,
In the aim of optimizing my zwave bandwidth usage (of which i have 66 zwave devices) i would like to gain an idea of what the community deems as acceptable range (low and high numbers) of number of messages received per hour from a single zwave device. I realize this is relevant to how many zwave device you have join and "chatting" so we should assume when defining the range that the zwave hub has a higher population of zwave devices e.g over 50 zwave devices. I am also referring to the use of non LR devices and the original zip zwave stack. Looking forward to your recommendations and thoughts
If there is a clear answer, it may differ between Z-Wave JS and Zip Gateway, just throwing that in. Which one are you using?
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And Z-wave LR.
Original zip zwave stack
non LR devices
I have close to 100 Zwave devices and I have never looked at that column until your post. When I sorted it based on msgs and looked at the devices with the most messages I observed that a Zwave motion had the most which makes sense, it’s outside and lots of moving objects. The next highest was a switch where I have a room lighting rule turn it off frequently because it’s in a high traffic area.
Personally this data point isn’t relevant to me because my mesh is working well. Years ago, been on HE hub for 7 years, I had a device go bad and things weren’t working well. Major slow downs and missed commands were observed. A zniffer helped figure out which device was spamming the mesh. Once removed all was well.
Of my 66 zwave devices 30 of them can report on 6 different sensors each and the light switch's can also report on power which can overwhelm zwave bandwidth. The numbers i have shown in the screenshot are greatly reduce to what the were with default reporting settings and i am attempting to establish a safe hourly message rang from the community that may have a higher number of chatty or reporting zwave devices
As a systems administrator, I'd run into networking bottlenecks with my data backups and the networking team would say "but the network utilization is low".
The issue was that my backups were "bursty". They'd send a bunch of data in a short timeframe and then be quiet for a while.
I suspect that's key to what you're asking here.
A few hundred messages in an hour might be fine if they're all spread out--but will wreak havoc if they happen all in a compressed time frame.
I'd suggest looking at every sensor and determining what makes sense for your use case and the available settings.
Do you really need to see every tenth of a degree of temperature change or is 2 degrees good enough.
Pare everything down to what you really need and is useful but not any more. Then, see how much traffic it generates.
Sensors can very much flood the network, so disabling any monitoring you don't need and limiting what you do need is useful.
Ideally, you'll get it trimmed down to a reasonable amount and it won't overload the hub.
Note: look into the "command retry" feature: it's amazing at ensuring devices receive commands, especially if the hub is busy.
