Serious Lagging

I am an installer that worked previously with a couple of other hubs. I have since switched to Hubitat and I am on my 4th hub.

I am a little concerned about lagging. I notice comments early on about lagging and I put in the rebooter app with nightly reboots and assumed that would clean up any issues daily. I have noticed that I have an installation with Lutron Caseta and ELK security. I am just shy of 100 devices but sometimes the hub getting really slow. I send a command to the Lutron Caseta from Hubitat and it appears not to work, then works 30 - 45 seconds later. A simple reboot solves the issue.

I also do have a few Z-wave devices (a lock, two motion sensors, ZRTII and two switches). I am worried that this might be the cause? There seem to be a lot of comments about Z-wave.

I do have an even bigger installation with a RA2 Select hub and a Caseta hub pro in a customer location but I do not hear any complaints from them yet. What I do not have at that location is any Z-wave devices.

I wish Hubitat had a memory CPU performance indicator to narrow down the issues. Maybe it is an app that I installed and that would be easier for me to determine if I had that information.

I am concerned about purchasing my 5th Habitat because of this. Does anyone else experience this?

Have you looked at app and device stats on the logs page?

That may give you some idea of what the hub is spending the majority of its time doing.

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I have no answer... I have ideas or perhaps just observations...

Let me get some base level ideas out first.. Lutron SmartHub Pro is the fastest integration I have encountered with Hubitat. Local, telnet (over ethernet), just really, really fast.

ZWave (and to a lessor extent, Zigbee) have to compete on radio bandwidth. They are half duplex protocols and so a conversation with a single chatty device can eat up enough time that next-in-line traffic gets delayed.

The two are really at opposite extremes of hub resources. The only thing that can get in the way of both is a third something that is eating a large portion of hub resources. "A simple reboot..." clears the memory of whatever was hogging, but eventually it gets back to saturation.

Hubitat does have a lot of performance metrics available, but like everywhere in the computer world, interpretation is needed.

In the Logs page are: Device stats and App Stats that can tell you if there's a high consumer that you need to review.

Screen Shot 2021-11-05 at 9.03.30 AM

% of total tells me that for MY hub, I need to fear ice formation. :smiley: There's nothing going on with Drivers :slight_smile:

Screen Shot 2021-11-05 at 9.04.44 AM

For Apps, again, nothing is indicating something to concern myself with... maybe I should be worried I need to add another 30-40 devices to keep the hub warm enough through the long winter :smiley: :smiley:

None of the above will help with detecting a ZWave or Zigbee issue however. If you have a bad mesh and the Hub is sending and resending and resending, and then the device at the other end responds and also has to resend and resend, you're going to be eating a lot of radio bandwidth.

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Good answers below. However, I have a basic question (that is of course stupid).

Are you on the current HUB software version?

I also assume your hubs are C-7's.

What is your wifi network configuration (there have been some issues here)

  • Network hardware
  • Hubitat connection to network

I ask because I have a wifi integration. It had significant latency problems with Hub version 2.2.8 that were alleviated with 2.2.9. Also, some of my users have had problems with specific routers and also bad LAN switches/extenders.

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Maybe a year or more ago this would have been more relevant, but the latest few updates in particular have really stopped any lags or need to regularly reboot for most people.

The few that do need to reboot, or are seeing lags appear to have something unique to their hub or setup. A root cause has not been identified yet, but I suspect that they are doing things like overwhelming their mesh with power reporting, using a community driver or app that is problematic, or there is some cloud integration that is slamming the hub. Not sure which, and while I am sure it is frustrating for these users, this doesn't seem to be widespread at all.

Again, this seems to affect some but not others. For the most part, Zwave works OK. Again there have been recent updates to Zwave stack and some behind the scenes changes, and it seems to have improved things. It is completely different than when the C7 came out in Summer 2020. So I won't look at those early posts about Zwave issues, maybe stick to the last 3 months or so to get a better feel for what people are experiencing.

The App stats and Device stats can do this. It isn't a graph, but still stats none the less. There is a community driver that can also gather hub information. [RELEASE] Hub Information Driver In addition, Hubitat recently added a warning that pops up when you have (to quote release notes) "A new alert for devices that produce 300+ events per hour. ". I understand from comments that they are tweaking this to give better warnings about things like this.

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I never use WIFI. That does not work out well. Everything is hardwired and the two Lutron Hub Pro, the Elk security system and the Hubitat are all on the same network switch.

I moved as much of the load off on to the Lutron Hub (I made the Picos work directly with the Lutron hub, all timed lighting events are now on the hub and I am going to remove the two Z-wave switches). I also had an ISY connected to the ELK Security system and I have removed that.

If it happens again I will post the logs.

I have 4 Hubitat Hubs interconnected and one of those has 27 Zigbee devices and 29 ZWave. (I only have Zigbee on One of my Hubs because most of my house is ZWave.) All of my hubs have the Lutron Integration, but I only use Picos, no switches or dimmers.

Every bed has a Pico stuck to its headboard to control lighting and fan via click or long push. Every bedroom has a Pico stuck to the wall (behind a two wide decora plate) that duplicates the headboard Pico. ALL of the Picos run through Hubitat and control ZWave switches, dimmers and in one case a RGBW Bulb plus the Zigbee Fan Controller. They are ultra fast for me. I've never measured but they certainly feel like the ZWave lights respond in 1/4 second.

That's:

  • a Pico button push, transmitted through the Lutron SmartBridge Pro
  • to Hubitat and then compute the target device(s)
  • send the commands and have them energized

in what I perceive to be 1/4 second.

Nice. Does your Lutron Hub connection ever hang?

not once since I got it back in 2018

My Lutron admiration came from my time as a Staples Connect hub owner which has integrated Lutron, as does Wink. Lutron stopped offering that apparently and forces the use of their Smartbridge (Pro in our case.) I purchased most of my Picos during this era. :slight_smile:

I had several weeks of grumbling before purchasing a Lutron Smartbridge Pro when I got my first Hubitat in 2018. Plugged it in, never thought about it since, except when I have to remember how to spell it for messages like these :smiley:

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