Performance of Homey suitable with quite some devices, sensors, actors of different brands/technologies?

Hi there,

To conclude this trail.
The Homey Pro is a few weeks up & running now (frist batch :wink: ). I have installed:

  • 20+ dimmers
  • 3 plug-in switches
  • 1 ventilator
  • 2 screens
  • 1 6-plugs socket
  • 3 door sensors
  • 2 smoke detectors
  • 20+ apps
  • 30+ flows

Homey seems pretty decent from a performance perspective. Sometimes I experience some lag/delay when switching or executing a flow, but usually it responds quite fast. Besides that I sometimes experience in the app a message “something went wrong” when trying to reach my devices… pressing the “button” Devices a second time usually brings up the page with all devices.

So in the end I am fairly happy with the Homey.

1 Like

Running Homey 1.5 here with:

  • 30+ z-wave devices (various plugs and buttons)
  • 70+ zigbee devices (mainly Ikea, and Xiaomi some hue and innr)
  • 100+ flows.
  • 20 apps

I think everything is fairly snappy and never really notice any major lags (see disclaimers below).

The UI is pretty slow but as I use it mainly for automation I never use the Homey app to control anything (the 1.5 app is horribly slow with many devices as it paginates and do not cache).

The other issue I have is with zigbee and that is most likely due to how it is implemented as all commands are sent one-by-one so clicking a zigbee button which turns on 3 lamps and change the color will take several seconds (but this takes several seconds without many devices as well).

// Michael Medin

Isn’t a normal response time from a smarthome hub in general expected to be around 100 ms if you click a device, turn on/off a light or run a flow?

A response time of 1 second or more is actually slow. My Homey is even much slower than that in most cases. However, my old 433 MHz independent plugs responds instantly, probably within 10 or 20 ms, when I press a wall switch.

Not really sure what one would expect, I ran another hub before with z-wave only and had similar response times.

What one has to remember is that both zigbee and z-wave are low-power mesh network. This means when I press my battery powered button:

  1. the button has to wake up
  2. Send out a notification
  3. Notification picked up by a random light bulb in the path which forwards the notification.
  4. It is again picked up by a random thermometer in the path and forwarded again.
  5. Then homey receives it and starts a program which was possibly swapped to disk to conserve ram.
  6. My logic is evaluated and a command is sent off.
  7. This command traverses the mesh network back.
  8. The lamp turns on

This can never really be expected to be millisecond fast, but on the up-side the battery in my button lasts years…

Before Homey in my z-wave only controller I used to use groups and such which meant that the button could talk directly to the lamp (without the controller even being online). But the cost was reduced logic (i.e. pressing the button turned on the lamp, always… ) as well as it was a lot more complicated to configure.
Then came central scenen which is what Homey use and this means everything has to be routed to the controller (Homey). If your mesh is small you might get a direct line to Homey and thus low(er) latency.
But in my case the batter powered button takes seconds (plural) to start up. Thus when I press it in the morning it takes 3 seconds for the light to turn on, if I press it again it takes maybe 1 for it to turn off. So the bigest latency is powering the button, not traversing the mesh.

This is why I use z-wave over zigbee for light, a z-wave button (in general) is installed behind the regular switch and this means the switch is instantaneous (as it never talks to Homey as it just flips the relay).
And Homey handles automation, where I dont really care much about latency…

// Michael Medin

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I don’t fully agree on this. If you do a simple test. Get a laptop, open the https://developer.athom.com/tools/zwave and enable the log you would see that communication between the devices and homey is really fast. But sometimes, for some reason, it takes just a bit to long for the light to switch on.

Well, I am no expert here, so I am talking about subjective experience from using Homey and another controllers.

What you see in the logs, again I assume, is the time from when Homey received the command and Homey sending the new command, Not the actual time the data was sent from the button, nor received from the lamp (thus you have the time without mesh latency there).

My experience is that the latency is pretty varied, depending on how much chatter there currently is.
For instance I before had a (possibly?) faulty node which was very chatty and spammed the network causing latency for other devices. When I removed that thing improved, but sometimes I still get unexpected latency.

But my point is that it is never milli second fast (i.e. I always notice the latency), but frequently it is overshadowed by when battery powered devices like buttons take time waking up (which I notice in the range of seconds).

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Exactly, the latency I experience seems almost random. Sometimes a flow to switch off several dimmers takes literally seconds (up-to 5-10) ans sometimes it is faster. But most of the times it takes at least half-a second or more (feels like waiting). Also grouped devices (PIR with light, dimmer with other light) usually takes so much time it feels like waiting. So running flows is quite OK, because a little delay is no problem for me in those cases. But switching lights and having to wait is annoying.

My solution to that was in-wall z-wave switches (as they don’t use z-wave when you click they are all but instant)…

In addition most z-wave soft switches are terribly designed, many requires clicking to wake up, and many will reset config if you accidentally long-press or tripple click or some such meaning you end up having to re-pair them…

But I had a pretty big latency issue before which was solved when a possibly faulty device was removed.
Also check-out heal as that can improve latency as well if you have a big network…

// Michael Medin