Zigbee and CPU - Athom support gives up => support didn't give up!

Developers
1

The last couple of days I have been in contact with Athom support. Allow me to explain my case…

I have a Homey (Early 2016) running f/w 5.02. Before I update to v5 I had issues with excessive CPU loads. They would go over 200% and Homey became sluggish or went offline. I had already replaced the power supply, so that issue was not part of my problem.

I contacted Athom support and they told me that my zigbee communication was the reason for the load. I accepted that and thought that the zigbee rewrite with v5 would solve the issue.

So, I now find myself running v5, have reset my zigbee and re-included all devices and rebuilt my flows. To my dismay the CPU load is still excessive… (150% or more)

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I contacted support again. They did try to help me. They concluded that the 4 routers were the cause, as they were constantly communicating with Homey, flooding it with data…the advise was to check my flows!

I installed Papertrails and added logging to all flows (great App @Dijker.G !). Flows are not looping, no strange triggering of multiple flows. All is fine!

This I reported back to Athom support. I explained that we are talking about 4 routers; 3 curtain controllers and a relay. The relay does not have any flows; it is a zigbee repeater. The curtain controllers only have flows that are triggered by a switch. I press that switch once or twice a day!

I switched off the Aqara App completely; cpu drops to around 75%

Athom now simply confirms that zigbee is flooded with data and the 4 routers are the cause. I checked the options in the curtain controller and the relay; they do nog have a setting to decrease reporting interval. If I check the reporting interval in developers, I see the curtain updates every 4 hours!

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The relay more frequently:

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@TedTolboom
Can the curtain controller or the relay cause flooding of the zigbee?

I was hoping that my case would help Athom improve Homey. Unfortunately I feel they do not see an oppurtunity to use my experience to resolve the problems and - hopefully - fix a bug/issue that others are experiencing too.

PS
Was not sure in which topic to post. Please @moderators, feel free to place in the correct section of the forum!

2

Easy test: turn them off (remove power from them completely) and see what happens.

1 Like
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I would doubt that… but I don’t see the loggings as Athom does.
Can you share the ticket number and contact of Athom support (as PM), I’ll see if I can get more information.

In parallel, can you send a diagnostics log of the Aqara app with your forum ID as reference (no need to publish it here). I’ll check those loggings as well.

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I switched the App off. Removing power is a bit more complicated, but would be a good test.

5

Thank you @TedTolboom
I send you a P.M.

For whom it interests. In developers I see that the curtains report every 4 hours and the relay more frequent. Athom’s feedback was that they see zigbee communication every second.

6

Let’s follow-up with Athom support.

In the shared app diagnostics report, I only see the relay reporting it’s state every 60 seconds. Which should not explain the high utilization.

Do note that this are only the loggings that are parsed by the Zigbee core towards the app / driver space. Basic Zigbee communication is handled by the Zigbee core exclusively and could still lead to an excess of communication.

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7

An update!

With the help of @TedTolboom we investigated the cpu further. Thanks for that Ted!

Support did indeed contacted me again (thanks Bas and Boaz!). In the end we came to the conclusion that my setup was streching the bounderies of my early 2016 Homey.

I was oscillating between forgetting about Homey zigbee and setting up DeConz via my Synology, keeping Homey as the ‘logic controller’. After some thought I have decided to stick with Athom and upgrade my Homey to a Homey Pro.

2 Likes
8

What was so special about your setup that it caused all that CPU usage?

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A combination of amount of flows and 100+ devices

10

So 750 flows with 178 devices will kill my Homeys?

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Not everyone has a superHomey

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True that. But the 750 flows and the lots of devices was running on a 2016 model.