Model C-5 Resource Leak?

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Hi All,

This is my first post here, so I apologize if I ruffle any feathers. I've lurked for quite a while and found some other posts on this topic that suggest people seem to get offended by this suggestion. I am simply looking to document my scenario and my findings in hopes of getting a resolution and hopefully help others too.

I did open a ticket (15247) with Hubitat Support. It took over a week to respond (they are busy), but they were unable to provide much assistance because my device is not connected to or registered on the internet. This prevents them from connecting to it remotely to access their logs. I'm kind of at my wits end and want to throw this thing in the trash.

I will say that I love the concept and while it has some quirks, everything else about the product seems to be great. It can operate completely offline, which was exactly why I bought it since I don't have available home internet in my home. It also has the ability to do both z-wave and zigbee, which gives me more flexibility as I build out my smart home, etc., etc., stuff/features that you already know.

But what I have found is that after 3 or 4 days, the main WebUI progressively deteriorates in terms of responsiveness to a point where it is completely unresponsive. I notice the pages start to load slower after a day, with it taking about 3 or 4 seconds. After day 2, it may be about 6 or 7 seconds; Day 3, 13 or 14 seconds and so on until the main WebUI completely stops responding, requiring a reboot.

While this is happening and before any reboot, the Diagnostic Tool page on port 8081 will continue to load perfectly. Most of the Rules in Rule Machine appear to work, but are delayed or slow. This is what originally tipped me off to the WebUI being slow when I went to investigate.

I have never installed any 3rd party apps and have only used Rule Machine (3.0 and then 4.0), Hubitat Dashboard, Motion Lighting and Simple Lighting.

I have never installed any 3rd party drivers for any of the devices that I have. I have a Leviton z wave plus dimmer switch, a Zooz z wave plus Outdoor Motion sensor, Philips Hue zigbee Outdoor Motion Sensor, a Sylvania zigbee wall plug, an Inovelli z wave plus switch, and 3 Ikea Tradfri zigbee wall plugs.

They are listed in order in which I originally purchased and installed them, over the course of a couple of months. The issue was first noticed after installing the Leviton switch and Zooz Motion Sensor, since I started with those, but I didn't realize at the time that it was as big of an issue as it is.

I have a Netgear R7000 router running DD-WRT. I found some posts indicating Hubitat having an issue with Netgear routers, so I tried the following:

Changing the network cable to several different ones.
Changing the port speed on my router to 100mbps.
Changing the port to half-duplex.
Using a different port on the router (one that was in use by another device).
Plugging a Trendnet switch into the router and plugging the Hubitat into that instead.
All of these have had the same results.
I even tried plugging the Hubitat and a laptop into the same switch and was going to use static IPs, but learned that Hubitat requires a DHCP server. I haven't gotten to the point of setting one up on that laptop yet. I may have an old router around that I can test too.

Here is where things start to get interesting.

Thinking that perhaps there was corruption in the database or something, I decided to do a Soft Reset from the Diagnostic Tool. This went well and it required me to go through the process of setting up again, the same way as when I first unboxed it. Only this time, I decided not to install any devices or any apps. I simply left it in its vanilla state.

Same results!

The main WebUI continued to progressively deteriorate while the Diagnostic Tool page loaded just fine. There were no apps or devices installed. The Hubitat was still connected to the switch, which was connected to the Netgear router.

At this point, I decided to contact Support.

They said that there wasn't much they were going to be able to do since my Hubitat was not connected to the internet for them to access remotely. I copy/pasted the log entries from the device into a .doc and sent it to them, but they said they needed the error log. When asked how to get it for them, they said there is no way to do it - it can only be accessed remotely.

They did however send me a command that they said was supposed to disable autonegotiation on the ethernet port, but I'm not sure if they sent the right one: 'lanautonegconfigenable'

I didn't write the code, but it seems like it should say 'disable' instead of enable. Either way, it didn't help.

They also said to reset my z wave and zigbee radios, which I did and that too didn't help.

The only other suggestion they had was to ensure I was using a supported Web Browser, which I am - and have been seeing the same behavior from 3 different computers, an Android phone and an iPad.

I'm not sure how much more help I'm going to be able to get from Support. They made it very clear that they designed the product to be supported remotely over the internet and that local diagnostics is limited.

I feel I may be starting to ramble now and I'm not sure if I've forgotten anything important, but I guess this is kind of a hail mary.

I'm thinking maybe I'll just have to figure out a way to schedule a daily reboot (any tips?) until they either sort it out on their own or find an alternative hub.

Thanks for any help anyone can offer.

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Hi @dmarsman. I had the network problem too. I was able to see it by pinging my hub, it showed a lot of time outs. These are the instructions I used to fix it:

Hub IP address/hub/advanced/network/lanautonegconfigenable

Once you've accessed the page, please reboot your hub from "Settings". When the hub comes back online, please confirm that the configuration was applied, by accessing this page:

Hub IP address/hub/advanced/network/lanautonegconfigstatus

If the change was successful, the message displayed should be: "auto negotiation config true"

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Thanks @Wounded !

Using that status command, I was able to confirm that mine is also already set to true.

Running a ping -t to my hub, I am seeing no returns greater than 2ms. Even right now, while my WebUI takes a full 10 seconds to navigate from one page to the next.

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I'm curious as to how you were able to update from Rule Machine 3.0 to Rule Machine 4.0 without being registered and connected to the internet?

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I temporarily tethered the network to my mobile phone so that I could install the 2.1.7.118 update and the new Rule Machine came with it (I think).

Doing so uses data on a pay-per-mb usage though, so it's costly to have it on the internet.

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So then your hub is registered, (otherwise hubitat wouldn't have any idea a location to check to send an update to) just not continuously connected to the internet.

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If it is, it did so without me entering any information.

I simply connected it to the internet, went to Settings -> Check for Updates and downloaded the update that it said was available. I wasn't asked for any information.

If I go to the Registration section now, it says "Register Your Hub. Please complete your Hubitat Elevation Registration in order to use cloud services. Click below to log into the Hubitat Elevation Portal and link your hub to your Portal Account."

Either way, I'm not sure if it changes things, just answering your questions.

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@dmarsman I experienced a similar but not same issue with my C4. Like you, I became beyond frustrated and after 2 weeks of VERY limited support I gave up and bought a new C5. My issue was a little different in that after a week of the WebUI becoming unresponsive and me having to do hard reboots, the hub WebUI eventually completely stopped accepting requests (even on port 8081). My hub would only respond to pings. Support told me it had to be my network, though I had taken my hub and plugged into a layer 2 switch with just a laptop running a DHCP server. I have had a new C5 online for 4 or 5 days now and so far so good. Unfortunately fixing my issue cost about 8+ hours of performing similar troubleshooting steps you mentioned above and eventually spending $$.

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I'm wondering if being offline could be causing the issues. The hub still needs to set the time for sunrise/sunset and such. Could the inability be causing a backup of things waiting to be processed?

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@Ken_Fraleigh It's very possible. Although that would kind of go against the idea of it being able to process everything locally.

If it adds any clues to the mystery, I have been updating the clock using the "Update Time from Browser Time" button, so it is usually in sync unless it has been locked up for a few days.

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I feel your pain. I sincerely hope your new C5 works better for you than your C4.

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Watching the thread as I would still love to understand what happened to my hub and if it's possible to bring it back to life but I'm done spending hours of time on troubleshooting to be told it's my network.

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I had network issues with mine. I ended up buying a TP-link 5 port unmanaged switch for $15 on Amazon and hooked up my old SmartThings hub, 2 HE hubs, and a PC running HomeBridge to it and everything's running well so far. It's only been about a week, but I was able to pause my nightly RM reboot rule that had been running for the past couple months.

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@Ken_Fraleigh I have several switches, but I no longer have any old routers (only the one I am using). If you are using a switch, how are you assigning IP addresses without DHCP from the router? Did you set up a separate one?
It looks like Hubitat does not allow static IP addresses.

Also, would you mind sharing your RM setup for schedule nightly reboots?

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With a complex system comes complex problems. And I have no doubts that there is a legitimate problem here. There have been enough reports of hub slowdowns and outright crashes (port 8081 not responding) by a wide sample of users.

There could be a dozen things that cause these symptoms but that doesn’t de-legitimize the complaint.

It’s unfortunate that support is not directly acknowledging the issue because it has reached the point were credibility is starting to be lost.

You can add me to the list of those who have been affected.

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We believe there is indeed a resource leak in some systems. And, there have been other issues that cause slowdowns as well, including errant apps/drivers and a networking problem with some routers. We are well aware of the issues, however, it is not so easy to diagnose.

We are taking steps to find and fix the resource leak, and I can say we don't yet have a solution for it. When this happens, as some have found, rebooting the hub clears up the problem, at least for some amount of time. The dang thing is very sneaky and hard to pin down.

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Prepare for this thread to explode.

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Thanks for the info, I'm available to test new UI, to re do my entire home if it will help HE, I have 2 hubs in my house, 3 friends with HE that we can use for testing. Good luck catching the bug.

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There are multiple problems with the same eventual symptom: slow down.

One is the network interface issue that can be mitigated by 'autonegotiation' -- this is where the UI is pretty much always slow. Nothing else is affected. Automations run normally. Ideally the platform could/should identify high error rates on the Ethernet port -> another red ball warning, perhaps.

One is where the DB is corrupt. The corruption seems to apparently extend the DB response time and again, the platform could help by monitoring access times and --> another red ball warning, perhaps.

It's been several platform releases since these symptoms were identified. I think it's time the platform participated in diffusing the common eventual symptom. While it might be wonderful to never have a DB corruption, while Hubitat users wait for that eventual day.. couldn't a warning help?

In other words, people with those symptoms come here and get advice to get the autonegotiate patch or to do a soft reset, how harmful would it be to have the platform give that advice.?

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I exhausted all of my troubleshooting options and got frustrated to the point where I switched platforms, so I can get where the OP is coming from. This stuff is supposed to be Home Automation, constantly babysitting the hub and worrying about keeping things running smoothly kind of defeats the whole purpose.

Good to see some official acknowledgement of this resource leak problem from Hubitat, and I would hope that more resources are dedicated to fixing this issue before adding more features. I know at least in my case, it wasn't the LAN autonegotiation, or custom apps - I had a mostly stock and clean system.

I loved Hubitat when it worked, but rebooting every night and slow response times is not something I want deal with at all. Hope to return soon when everything is running smoothly.

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