Upfront I’ll tell you it might also have to do with a slightly complicated home network I tried to build to ensure privacy protection.
When at home and connected to WiFi the homey app will load but it takes several seconds for devices and widgets to load. When I used Homey Pro before I switched to SHS it used to load almost instant. When it loads it works perfect.
When out of home trying to acces homey through 5G it will either load after 3-4 tries or it keeps timing out. The only way for me to acces homey is to use unifi’s built in VPN (teleport in the wifiman app) to connect to my home network and acces it that way. But it still takes a few tries to load but then most of the time it will kinda load.
So the set up is:
Unifi setup with two internal networks. One for personal use, the other for all IoT devices to connect to.
SHS on a Mac mini (latest model) ethernet connected into the primary (personal) network.
Homey bridge on the primary network.
(There is a pihole adblokcer running in docker on the Mac aswell)
I’ve already tried with and without setting up port forwarding, didn’t appear to make a difference.
I’ve tried turning off the docker with pihole and turning off the DNS reroute. Also didn’t appear to make a difference.
It will connect to homey, showing the green check at the bottom of the screen but all widgets (except from the weather one) will time out, same as the full device page ‘timeout after 10000ms’
Also interesting detail, the contents of the time never appear to load except for when on the home wifi, then it loads fine.
Connecting to the XXXX.connect.athom.com ping page will always show true, wifi or 5G.
I hope someone has some tips or is willing to troubleshoot with me to make my homey experience fast and snappy again
Since the weather part loads, your Homey app can still reach your Homey. Have you already tried temporarily disabling your advanced network and using a cheap/regular (ISP) router instead? Then you can at least determine if it’s a network issue. If the issue is still there, I would suggest contacting Athom:
I think at least when you connect per VPN, it should not be much slower than your 5G data connection allows.
Is other local stuff also responding sluggish when away and using VPN?
I agree with Sven here: to troubleshoot sluggishness or odd behaviour, you’d start with a network as simple as possible: No separate iot subnets, no pihole, firewalls and all that.
When Homey responds as you would expect, it’s clearly a local network issue.
Next, start by adding / enabling each network influencing tool one by one in order to identify the culprit.
I strongly advice to only use the port forwarding feature for short tests.
Just use VPN if you like to access Homey per virtual local network.
I’ve no clue about Unify VPN, I use OpenVPN on my Synology NAS, and it’s as as if I’m at home when away.
Yes, I agree. IP scanner bots on the internet will find it in no time. My VPS server gets thousands of requests every day from bots looking for and attempting to infect (outdated) routers, cameras, WordPress instances, etc. There is a bot request almost every 10 minutes, so even enabling it for a short time can cause issues.
Or use Tailscale, it’s faster than regular OpenVPN (at least in my case, since it connects your devices directly via P2P without a relay server), no ports required and works behind cgNAT as well. Note that this only works if you also have a Tailscale exit node on f.e. a Raspberry Pi or a NAS.
Thanks.
Yeah, I’ve done tests with it, it is userfriendly and works fine.
I can’t discover differences in speed, in other words, OpenVPN is snappy enough for me
But Tailscale a cloud service, meaning: the P in VPN for private, is something I can’t check, I don’t believe all statements (“it’s really safe!”) by companies, so I’d rather don’t trust my data to a company’s network.
I try to keep my data in my own network as much as possible.
And yes, I’m aware of “there’s no such thing as privacy anymore”
Probably it’s my hardware that’s running it (Netgate SG1100 with pfSense) or my configuration then, but for me OpenVPN is very slow (about 11 Mbps, while my internet connection allows 200Mbps download and 300Mbps upload). Still not as slow as Asustor’s EZConnect though, that’s even worse with speeds at maximum 2 Mbps, but often slower. When I want to watch a (regular HD) downloaded video from my NAS using its EZConnect service, the video is constantly buffering.
It is open source though. Also, Tailscale connects your devices directly via P2P most of the time, so often it doesn’t travel through a relay server at all. In that case, those are only used for connecting you and your device, also known as “signaling”, after which your devices communicate directly to eachother. This is also used by many IP cameras nowadays to keep costs for streaming the videos low, since the signaling server only sends/receives a few packets, after which the devices are directly connected to each other via a P2P connection
Thanks for the help, but unfortunately no progress.
I’ve tried hooking up my ISP’s standard router straight into the fiber port coming into my home. Connected ethernet from there into the Mac mini and disabled Docker running pihole.
Restults are still the same. Connected to the ISP routers wifi, loading wordt but still not very snappy. When on 5G, ’ timeout after 10000ms’.
I’m going to try to open a ticket to Athom for help and will forward this thread into it aswell. I hope they will be able to help. Will post once I know more / have a solution.
