How to diagnose lags in z-wave response times

[simonmason]

I am using a lot of z-wave devices and I am frequently noticing lags in response time. For example switching on a light and the event that triggers the other lights in the room runs several seconds later, or even 20 seconds later. This doesn't happen all of the time - maybe 1 in 10 or 20. But it is clearly not what you want when running lighting scenes or triggering events. I did start to go down the scene route to alleviate this but so many of my switches didn't support scenes that it became a waste of time.

I am running a Z-Net. My server is running Windows 7 on a Core i5-4690K running at 3.5 GHz, 16GB ram. The server is also running Allonis for my touchscreens and HS2 for a few old devices. It also has an SSD drive. In general I would have thought that this would be more than enough horsepower to do everything.

So the question is, how do I figure out where these lags are coming. Is the Z-Net taking too long to transmit them to the server? Is the server too busy doing other things that it takes a while to acknowledge the Z-wave command and do something with it? How does one go about diagnosing this? Thanks.

[Rupp]

The first thing I would recommend is clicking on plug-ins manage then click on the Z-Wave entry under the plugin column and uncheck enable polling and test.

[simonmason]

Ok. I did that. What exactly am I disabling with this option? Thanks.

[simonmason]

Follow-up. I have a number of Leviton switches that report immediate status changes. I have them set to 0 in polling and I trigger events from them. So clearly disabling polling isn’t going to work as is.

If I do disable polling should I update the polling interval for theses switches? And as I want them to trigger lighting scenes, if I set to 1 second polling will this be worse?


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[BobSpen]

Leviton switches I believe have always had "instant status" and do not require ANY polling--they report back to HS if their state changes and Events will trigger just fine. Polling them(or any device at a 1 second interval will bring your Z-wave network to a grinding halt.
You should have very few if any devices polling and if you do have to poll a device(non-instant status) try to keep on an infrequent interval(minutes or hours) or if you can, poll it in an event right before you need to know it's state.

[Rupp]

You would never want to set any Z-Wave device to poll that often or it can bring your Z-Wave network to its knees. If you need instat status I would recommend getting switches that report status changes.

[simonmason]

I think I threw a red herring into the equation. I don't want to poll for status if I can help it. However, when I disabled enable polling my levitons with instant status stopped triggering events. I am not sure what this is all about. What exactly does turning off this feature do? Does it mean that wave devices that don't have instant status will never update in Homeseer? Thanks.

[kriz83]

I do not use polling on my network, but I notice that when it is turning off multiple devices at ones (say like 10), it takes 3-4 seconds before the last device is turned off. All my devices are joined 'securily'. Do I get faster respones when they are join 'unsecure' ?

[simonmason]

To confirm I am not polling the devices directly. But I am seeing lots of errors in my log that seemed to have started recently (last month or so) that I can't seem to diagnose. I don't know if these are related to the issues I am having related to the lagged responses.

[alexbk66]

I shared my findings here (post #9)
https://forums.homeseer.com/forum/ho...1-z-wave-delay

[simonmason]

What exactly does "Enable Polling" in z-wave options do? If I disable this, what is stopped? If I have an individual device set to poll every 60 minutes in the device setup - will it no longer be polled if enable polling is disabled in z-wave options? Thanks.