Interesting Reason for Slowness - Echo Speaks

Good to hear. The latest version is now on his GitHub under the beta channel for echo speaks.

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I've installed the most recent release and as soon as I created a couple of actions my HUB started to slow down and many of my unrelated RM4 rules became unresponsive. I disabled all eco speaks apps and devices and the hub is back to working order.

Any advice?

Contact @tonesto7. Under the app I believe there is an option to send logs and diagnostic info to the author.

I made the decision last night to rewrite the web request system.
So Iā€™m going to do that today and push out the update tonight or tomorrow.

Iā€™ll wait until youā€™re done to install.

I have a suspicion that the slow downs are more common to a specific hardware version of the hub.

Could you guys with slow downs please share the hardware and platform version of your hub?

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As requested! As I mentioned elsewhere, my slowdown has resolved itself after deleting the app/devices, shutting down the HE completely for a few minutes, and rebooting.

43%20

you deleted all the custom app and drivers?

Yes, I first went to the Echo Speaks details page and clicked the ā€œremoveā€ button, and after the app had uninstalled itself (including deleting the devices), I deleted the code for Echo Speaks, Echo Speaks - Action, and Echo Speaks Device. I donā€™t know that deleting the code did anything, but I tried that before I tried shut down, wait, and reboot.

@tonesto7, could the slowdowns relate to the number of Alexa-enabled devices? I have 11 Echos, a Five TV stick, three speaker groups, and one Alexa-enabled phone. I did notice in an earlier version of the Echo Speaks app that it was too much for me to try to use all of these devices with Echo Speaks, so I have always limited myself to just a single ā€œEverywhereā€ speaker group, but maybe the update triggered a refresh of all the devices that was just too much for HE to handle?

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It's a good question, and actually something I suspected on the Chromecast integration as well. I have a ton (11, 12 something like that) Chromecast devices and it seemed like the more I enabled/integrated the faster I had hub issues - especially on a network blip (switch reboot due to firmware update being the most common).

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I don't think so... If the hub can't handle my making 30 requests over a 1 minute period then it's doomed. 30 requests is absolutely nothing on a modern device. It would scare you how many requests each Echo makes to amazon at a given moment :slight_smile:

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A bit of a leap, but it's probably 50/s, and a throughput limit of 512kbps for iot messaging. (aka not the audio or video stream)

If we assume they use their own AWS IoT service, then the limit of publishes is 100/s in and outbound, perhaps it's somewhat symetrical then 50/s is probably a fair number. This is a hard limit, for externals anyways.

There's also a per account limit, which is shared across all the devices but is scalable. So while devices might peak to a higher number, most of the time they're asleep and moving little data. Again the broker set the keep alive maximum at ~10 mins.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/aws_service_limits.html#limits_iot

Anyways, sorry you asked? :slight_smile:

Or doesn't if you pi-hole your Echo devices. :wink: I cut the number of calls back to Amazon by about half by doing that. Granted, there were some paperweight issues with the loss of connectivity, but damn it, I saved all the bytes! LOL

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@tonesto7, given that I was able to restore my HE to functionality by deleting Echo Speaks, I thought I would try a completely fresh install of your 09/24 updated version (I had previously deleted all the Echo Speaks code and the Heroku server app), and the installation itself is now running without having compromised my HE's performance. I haven't yet started incorporating my "new" Echo device back into my RM rules; it will take some time to rebuild the rules, but I will be sure to post if things get bogged down again.

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Just to pipe in here since traffic seems to slowed on this thread. I Have a C-5 HE on the latest OS and have been running the latest Echo Speaks version and monitoring it with Hub Watchdog. I contInue to have slowdowns on my z-wave devices, and not my zig bee. It takes no more than 24 hours for it to be noticeable.

When I disable Echo Speaks and itā€™s devices and reboot the slowdown ends. I saw no errors in the logs with it turned on or off.

Just thought I would add this to the thinking process because for me, while 3.0 seems better, I still have the issues. Not out of the woods yet on 3.2.

EDIT: by the way, I have 6 echo devices running if that helps.

LJ

Generally, a hub slowdown is remedied by rebooting. The question is, does the problem recur as frequently with ES disabled? I found that it does for me with the new version. I disabled ES for a couple days and still had the slowdown and had to reboot the hub to resolve it, so I re enabled ES and plan on getting another hub to split the automations.

Ken,

While running Echo Speaks reboots were only a temporary solution, with the slow down returning within 24 hours and continuing to worsen until the next reboot. Since disabling ES 48 hours ago. the problem has not recurred.Yet, at least.

I am not experiencing the slow down as you did after disabling ES, so far. I really don't want to own and maintain two hubs simply because of the increased complexity. I would rather wait until the HE C-6 comes out with the hope that they make it more powerful with more processor power and memory. I only have about 150 total devices defined, and only about 50 of those use z-Wave or ZigBee radio. The rest are LAN/WAN based or HE Groups and those use HE standard drivers and Apps for the most part. I have about 20 Rm rules, none of which are very complex. I don't feel like I should have to buy two HEs to handle the load.

LJ

No, I completely agree and appreciate your follow up. You might try posting in the main ES thread to see if @tonesto7 has any suggestions, or sending him your logs.