Hub slows down over a day

I got two days before motion lighting started to slow down. Loading the apps page also was slowing down.

I’ve been making changes during this time span.

The same hub I discussed above: "upstairs" has been running since the 12th...

...with no detectable issue. I've had Live Logs on for hours.. no "error" when I search for that word.

I can’t say the same.

I was making several changes and had errors with chromecast and a rule canceling delayed actions that didn’t exist.

I’ve fixed the error issue, but still get errors off and on with chromecast devices and ecobee.

I had Chromecast on my 3rd hub (aka: Coordinator) because that's what that hub is for.. to run the cloud stuff. (Weather and Echo too.) It's the central hub in my system, with Homebridge spoked off. Homebridge and Echo both provide me voice options. It's strange to have both because we rarely use either of them. 90% of this year's usage is either 1) Testing that the newest thing added correctly; or 2) showing off to visitors.. which we haven't had in months.

I moved Chromecast off to Node-Red a month or so ago, just to see if it was better.. Seems about the same, so I haven't bothered moving it back.

But I have none of that 'type' of app/driver on my Upstairs Hub.

I only have one hub. Includes everything.

Apps, drivers, cloud connections, homebridge.

Yes, I remember, but I'm wondering why mine is so much more stable... maybe it's ChromeCast (Beta) -- hard to know without disabling it.

I had these issues with motion lighting slowing down since the start. Before I had google devices...

My motion lighting will start around 300ms and go up to a full second over a day or so.

The loading of webpages will slow down too.

From my recent experience flaky devices especially Z-Wave ones seem to really impact the hub in a negative way - slowdowns etc. Groups containing those devices can really cause trouble too.

I have 3 hubs (2 regular ones like @csteele) and a control hub that I use for internet/cloud/misc stuff. Basically have no real apps other than Lutron/Maker/Groups everywhere + depending upon the hub - Amazon/Lock Code Mgr and Zone Motion. No RM or any of RM-lite apps.

I noticed I was getting a null exception error. If I clicked on it it took me to the parent app rule machine.

I’ve done several soft resets, so I figured I go back and change some rules I recently changed, by deleting and re doing them.

I then find a downgrade of the firmware and a upgrade to the most recent.

I will he watching the logs today.

Could you elaborate on flaky? Devices that don’t send data/updates often enough? Or ones that don’t respond to commands sometimes? Just an issue with z-wave but not zigbee it sounds like?

Yesterday I turned the firewall blocking off. Today so far so good, no slowdowns. I’ll give it a few more days to see if there’s any slowdowns.

I've had different kinds of issues with Z-Wave devices:

  • Overly chatty/super slow repeating Aeotec MultiSensor 6's bogging things down (getting like 9.6K throughput instead of 40/100k) - replaced those with Inovelli 4-in-1s and things improved as far as I could tell from zniffing.
  • Qubino Dual relay that died (likely due to power issues during a storm) which caused other nearby ZW switches to stop responding or be very slow. Replaced with some Zooz toggles.
  • Aeotec 7 Repeater that also just stopped working. Not sure why on this one - it was on a power backup. Would get an unknown device pop up during zwave discovery etc. Maybe other things were impacted not sure.
  • I am still getting very slow performance of my Aeotec Dual Nano relay but the latest drivers have sped up the response from 7-9 seconds to 3-4 on physical switching triggering events. I may clear out the settings and or exclude/include again but not a priority

As far as Zigbee - an Iris repeater plug started causing my entire Zigbee network to go offline (as in the HE service reported "offline") every so often.. I only found out because the plug would not run my "rules" sometimes (my ZB mesh is strong and I have no xiaomi stuff). Was really weird. Swapped it out with a different one and have not had either issue since.

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Interesting. I should probably do a better job of paying attention to each specific device. For the Aeotec MultiSensor 6, when you say throughput of 9600k, do you mean LAN speed or Z-wave speed? How were you able to determine this, just from the router connection (if you mean lan) or something?

It has now been 9 days since I reconnected my Hubitat to the internet and it has not begun to slow down at all. Strange in that I was having issues before blocking the internet connection and blocking it seemed to improve things.... I was expecting the issue to return after re-connecting to the internet.

It would be wonderful if there was a way to see overall CPU and Mem usage or something like that.

I guess at this point I am going to slowly begin to re-add apps and see where that leads me. If it seems that at some point I hit another wall, maybe the answer is a linked/slave hub. I'll keep everyone posted.

I'm sure @erktrek means z-wave throughput. And that's 9.6 kbits/sec, not 9600 kbits/sec! You can determine this using a tool like PC Controller (or even z-wave toolbox).

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Screen Shot 2020-06-26 at 4.00.36 PM

You can see in the Speed column, that the communications between devices jumps between 3 Zwave speeds: 9.6k, 40k and 100k. The speed between any two devices is 'negotiated' It's 9.6k (aka 9600 bits per second) at the beginning, Joining, because there's no way to know in advance. Each device will report to the Hub, it's maximum speed. If there's an intermediate router that works at a lower speed, that's the maximum effective speed.

Ideally, a ZNiffer trace like this would show rare instances of 9.6k and a lot of 100k. However, real world is never ideal. :slight_smile: Least not in my house. :smiley:

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Well, I've still been playing around with this a bit. There definetly are not any rogue or loud Z-wave devices. I haven't checked zigbee but there are not many, not much in the logs either.

Heres what I know:

As I add more apps to hubitat, I hit a breaking point where it starts to progressively get slower. If I don't hit that point, the speed never deteriorates. Interestingly, it seems to be slightly variable and internet connections (not counting lan) do put my hub closer to the breaking point. Heres the strange part, when I hit that breaking point, then restore a prior image that has fewer apps, it never improves. What I am required to do is soft reset and THEN restore the image. After that it works well until after manually adding back apps, i eventually hit a breaking point and have to start the process over again.

To me anyway, the hub doesn't seem all that loaded up, even with my max apps considering they are generally idle. Rule Machine doesn't do much unless a button is pressed, nor does ifttt, alexa, hue (not many bulbs either), myq, lutron, ecobee. In sum i have the following apps: rule machine, lutron, amazon, ifttt, ecobee, kasa (and running without kasa vs with doesn't seem to have any dramatic effect). Probably 10 lights, 5 bulbs, a couple motion sensors, 10 picos, a 3 alexa dots, one garage door, one thermostat, 3 kasa devices.

I am on the fence between:

-- Restoring an image that essentially only has rule machine, lutron, and hue... no ifttt, no alexa, no ecobee etc. Then running the majority of logic with home assistance (which i yet to know a whole lot about, but did get one going).

OR

-- Starting from scratch with the hub at factory defaults, hard reset. Rebuilding each rule with rule machine 4.0. Taking multiple backups along the way and being very careful not to cause an error while building my rule and not suddenly backing out while making the rule.. which I know has happened along the way.

OR

-- Trying the route of rebooting the hub once a day.

I question whether these issues really are a result of zwave or zigbee problems. If the hub can't get ahold of a device, it should generate an error and move on, not bog down. Nontheless, i just don't have that many devices. I am amazed by some on the forums describing their setups... Hubs loaded much more heavily than mine and performing just fine.

Have you upgraded your hub to version 2.2.3.142 or higher yet? I found all my slowness issues and requirements to reboot every few days seem to have disappeared with the latest version (touch wood).

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I have not, just downloaded and installed. Will post back with results, thanks for the suggestion.

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Woah! Yeah, they fixed it. Thanks for the suggestion, I had lost hope on the updates. Its blazing fast now, probably faster than even immediately after a reboot on the old firmware.

In any case, I started down the path of playing with Home Assistant. Node-red is pretty cool (although strange compared to how i am used to thinking, I guess) and I plan to do some of my automations there. The hubitat integration works really well so far. Certainly the cheapest way to get some very modern looking control panels.

Its looking like they should compliment each other nicely. Hubitat for Alexa, Lutron, Hue, kasa, z-wave, zigbee, basic automations. HA for control panels, ecobee, myQ, advanced automations, mqtt (from rtl_433). Was hoping that I could do all cloud controls in HA, but Alexa looks easier in Hubitat. Only thing left to figure out what to do with is Orbit.