So I just ordered two new C7 hubs. I currently run a single C7 hub that has all my devices and apps running from it. I also have an older C4 hub for which I have all my IoTaWatt devices connected as having them on my C7 hub bogged the hub down too much.
A couple of questions…
First, is there a way to see how many devices are on a single hub? I’ve been looking and outside of manually counting I haven’t seen a way to determine that? I’m assuming child devices count towards that device count?
In ordering the two new hubs my plan is to make one of the new ones a coordinator hub, the 2nd new one a zigbee only hub, and my exiting C7 a ZWave hub and keep the C4 for IoTaWatt. The coordinator hub will run the majority of the apps and have all the cloud connected devices. Hub Mesh will be running between the coordinator, zigbee, and ZWave hubs but NOT the C4 hub.
My bigger question is when hub mesh is enabled and devices shared between each hub? Do the hub mesh devices from other hubs count as a device on each hub? In other words, if I have 200 devices on each hub and turn on hub mesh, will each hub show 400 devices (going over the 250 limit) or does only actual devices connected to each hub count?
What would be the best practice for setting up my hubs in this configuration? I use Lutron, Nodered, Homebridge, Ecowitt, Tempest, and Hue.
Device count is at the bottom of the Devices page:
That count includes virtuals, but those can be sent over Hub Mesh too.
I have 4 hubs interconnected and there's two segments to your the question of "is 400 too many?" (or whatever the resulting shared device count is.)
First, there's no practical limit to the number of devices defined. That's just a DB row and for a device that does nothing, there's no impact to the hub because the hub is event driven. Obviously going to the Device page with 14 thousand devices is going to impact the hub while it builds that page. But once that task is done, the hub would return to "idle".
Second, as intimated above, it's the event count that impacts the hub's resources and a LAN connection is so so so much faster than Zigbee or ZWave that the impact of multiple hubs handling events is almost unmeasurable.
Think of this... a Contact Sensor detects a door/window change and sends an unsolicited message to its hub. The hub will respond at the protocol level and turn it into an event. The hub then 'mirrors' the Event to a connected hub. The connected hub then processes the Event, it didn't have to do the work at the protocol level for the device.. which is the resource intensive portion.
Thanks for the feedback. I'm not looking forward to tearing everything apart and rebuilding it but I'm confident this will be a better solution for my needs going forward. And thanks for the tip on where to find the device count. I never noticed it at the bottom but I figured it had to be listed somewhere.
