While I've not had my C4 hub crash, I've had some slow-downs of automation and noticed lag in loading Hubitat web pages (dashboards, devices, apps, settings, etc.) taking several times as long to load over the past couple of days. Doing some troubleshooting, I found a newly installed device that I believed to be causing issues with my Zigbee mesh. I took it offline and lo and behold, all of the hub web pages were loading quickly again without a reboot and after a rebuild of the mesh (hub offline for 20 minutes), all my automation is back to normal. Could it be something as simple as a single bad Zigbee repeater is causing the hub slowdowns and possibly the crashes of some hubs?
By the way, it's a single specific piece of hardware that was causing the slowdown. I have another device that's exactly the same and it's not causing any problem. One indicator that it was a bad device was that it was difficult to pair when another identical device paired easily.
Bill
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I think you are definitely on to something here. All my zigbee devices fell off my network last week. I would re-pair them but they would fall off again after a couple of days. I noticed that one if them was showing a low battery level. I changed the battery and so far things are sticking ok. Still early days so it may not be this.
BTW sometimes my rules took longer than normal to execute.
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I'd love to know what brand and kind of device it is so I'm armed with info like that when it comes to diagnosing my setup.
I get slow downs once in a while, but a reboot of the hub usually gets things back up to normal, an app someone on here wrote to reboot on a schedule has been a big help in that, but i'd love to run my HE without that crutch
A key word to keep in mind when we are looking at slowdowns: Serial.
@billmeek:
What device was it?
Manufacturer, Model # ?
Everyone wants to know, because we all want to know what to avoid.
And that's the exact reason I didn't provide any information about the device in my first post.
Any manufacturer could ship out a faulty device. It could be a single radio chip that they used that was bad out of a lot. As I posted, I have 2 of the devices and only one so far is apparently causing issues. And I only have anecdotal evidence so far without any real in-depth testing. I also have 4 more ordered that (hopefully) will be here soon so I can do further testing. I just got back from the local post office where I shipped (priority mail) back the questionable device to let the manufacturer inspect and test the unit. I'm sure they will be much better at it than I. But I don't think this is going to be device specific. I think it's more about either Zigbee or (more specifically) how the Hubitat is being affected by Zigbee repeater/mesh issues.
The main thing I wanted to do with this thread is ask the more knowledgeable people if a bad Zigbee repeater should be able to affect the hub that way. It might also give the Hubitat team another avenue of investigation or at least another data point to consider. But what I was hoping for was more feedback like received from Bob (aka @bobbles) confirming it was a strong possibility that Zigbee could be the cause for at least the slowdowns. While this may be hard to isolate for a hub with a large number of devices, someone with a smaller number of Zigbee devices might be able to easily find one causing trouble on their network further providing empirical evidence.
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I suggest using the Hub Watchdog to determine if its zwave, zigbee, or the hub itself that is the source of the slowdown. The app allows you to set up three virtual devices, and you can see the length of time a zigbee, zwave, and virtual switch respond.
