HSTouch latency?

[cadillackid]

is it just me or is HSTouch latency bad over 3G or remote Wi-Fi connections? I like to use my HSTouch on the iPAD to adjust my HVAC controls before i return home or such..

I have a 30 x 5 pipe at the house and accessing other devices on my network even my slingbox results in excellent connection speeds...

then I turn on HSTouch and the buttons take FOREVER to respond.. it seems its just HSTouch running slowly in a remote setting and not network issues.. i can even run other things on my HSTouch server like streaming music / video that are great.. CPU usage is in check.. RAM well under limits.. good network flow.. yet HSTouch is SLOW!

am I the only one?

on the local LAN at home, my HSTouch is fine..
-Christopher

[nightwalker]

I've noticed the same on the latest version of HSTouch. Previous versions were just fine. To be honest I haven't bothered to report it since all the thrust these days seems to be going to HS3 with everything else pretty much pushed to the side.

[cadillackid]

why bother with HS3 until HS2 works right?? or at least the GUI for HS2 at least works right...

I finally get my HS2 system stable as a rock and now im gonna have to upgrade to HS3 and go through all of it again??

ayyeeeeeee....

I guess they want everyone to pay pay pay so they come out with HS3 and catch us all for the upgrade $$$..
-Christopher

[Moskus]

why bother with HS3 until HS2 works right?? or at least the GUI for HS2 at least works right...

If that statement made sense we would be stuck with Windows 95. Or DOS. Or Qbasic on 8086 macines.

Seriously, should they keep fixing small bugs on the existing version rather than making a new version, with (hopefully) fewer bugs, better GUI, better stability and faster response?


I haven't noticed any lags in the Window client or the Android client, even if connected via 3G.

[mrhappy]

is it just me or is HSTouch latency bad over 3G or remote Wi-Fi connections? I like to use my HSTouch on the iPAD to adjust my HVAC controls before i return home or such..

I have a 30 x 5 pipe at the house and accessing other devices on my network even my slingbox results in excellent connection speeds...

then I turn on HSTouch and the buttons take FOREVER to respond.. it seems its just HSTouch running slowly in a remote setting and not network issues.. i can even run other things on my HSTouch server like streaming music / video that are great.. CPU usage is in check.. RAM well under limits.. good network flow.. yet HSTouch is SLOW!

am I the only one?

on the local LAN at home, my HSTouch is fine..
-Christopher

It may be the issue that HS are aware of (I logged a bug in the old helpdesk), there was a fix implemented in the server plugin.

If its the same problem its to do with how many updated device strings are being broadcast by the server, in my experience the main fault lied with a plugin that broadcast some analogue input values very frequently (every second or sooner)...this just locked up the client making the button presses to load new screens take seconds rather than being instant.

Try and enable the debug option on the server plugin and see how often your server plugin is broadcasting devices changes, if its very very often then try and disable the plugin that those devices belong to and then see if HSTouch speeds up.

[cadillackid]

by nature my whole system updates a lot of devices frequently.. ive been trying to only update the homeseer device when a change is actually made to the device rather than recklessly do a setdevicevalue or setdevicestring regardless of whether it has changed or not.. i used to not be very careful about that as it didnt matter.. but im going through all my scripts and programs to make sure im careful about it.. you are right there are lots of updates to devices, but i thought only the devices in use on my particular displayed screen were sent through.. but it looks like all device updates are sent all the time?

Moskus, yes you are probably right, however we arent at the Minor bug stage.. but then i do understand if the underlying reason for many issues on HSTouch is the complete architecture of HS itself.. where a rewrite or major version change is required yes its best to make the version change...

HOWEVER my beef is that then I'll have to BUY a version HS3-PRO (im sure $300 at least). . just to FIX what I already PURCHASED in a version HS2-PRO.... if it were required to make the purchase for more FEATURES.. thats a no brainer.. but to must buy new version to fix what I already paid for.. yeah then I have a beef and an issue....

and yes ive always had a beef with microsoft for that very thing too... it was always disguised as a new version of windows to gain new functionality (which you always do) but the real reason being to fix the bugs from the previous version.... in essence pay twice for certain things that never worked in the previous version...

-Christopher

[cadillackid]

I see what some of the issue is .. I use a lot of virtual devices as "placeholders".. meaning they simply store values that I may need for scripts to access, timers, micro-controller, debug data, etc...

these are items that I simply dont need to display on HSTouch however all of these items are being sent over the network to the HSTouch clients even though they arent being used by the client..

is there a way to set a device so that it's data is not used by HSTouch..

for those that use the MLHS plugin for MainLobby you can choose which devices are sent and which ones arent.. I had similar issues with MainLobby until I deselected these devices that are updated constantly..

seems there should be a way to do this in HSTouch as well? a way to sync only devices used on screens?
-Christopher

[huggy_d1]

I see what some of the issue is .. I use a lot of virtual devices as "placeholders".. meaning they simply store values that I may need for scripts to access, timers, micro-controller, debug data, etc...

these are items that I simply dont need to display on HSTouch however all of these items are being sent over the network to the HSTouch clients even though they arent being used by the client..

is there a way to set a device so that it's data is not used by HSTouch..

for those that use the MLHS plugin for MainLobby you can choose which devices are sent and which ones arent.. I had similar issues with MainLobby until I deselected these devices that are updated constantly..

seems there should be a way to do this in HSTouch as well? a way to sync only devices used on screens?
-Christopher

Mark devices to "hide from views". You can still access them directly by [$script=..] etc., but they won't show up in the 'devices' selector.

[mrhappy]

I see what some of the issue is .. I use a lot of virtual devices as "placeholders".. meaning they simply store values that I may need for scripts to access, timers, micro-controller, debug data, etc...

these are items that I simply dont need to display on HSTouch however all of these items are being sent over the network to the HSTouch clients even though they arent being used by the client..

is there a way to set a device so that it's data is not used by HSTouch..

for those that use the MLHS plugin for MainLobby you can choose which devices are sent and which ones arent.. I had similar issues with MainLobby until I deselected these devices that are updated constantly..

seems there should be a way to do this in HSTouch as well? a way to sync only devices used on screens?
-Christopher

No I think is the short answer, this was the helpdesk ticket reply;

Richard Helmke
22-Apr-2010-3:55 PM

Currently the server notifies all clients of any change to any device in HS. I agree that if you have many devices changing status and you are on a slow network this is an issue. We are looking at a way to register only the devices in use with the server so I hope to have an update that handles this at some point. I don't have a timeframe right now. If you have a script or plugin changing those devices, see if you increase the time between updates.


Regards,

Richard Helmke
HomeSeer Technologies LLC

The problem I was having was that devices I was not even using in HSTouch were killing the connection, I believe the update to the server plugin only sent the device change when the reset command was set to true (on hs.setdevicestring). Short of deleting any devices you don't need and/or changing how plugins are written i'm not sure what you can do...

[cadillackid]

mrhappy: it looks indeed like you are right.. and the issue is the devices im using are a lot of the parameters im using for my HVAC system.. and so they are values.. there are damper readings, microcontroller data from each of the HVAC units themselves, timers, temperature readings, motion sensors from cameras, network performance data, weather data etc..

things that change on a very regular basis and need to stay up to date and a lot of it at a pretty timely interval....

some of them i guess i will have to go and change the command to use devicestring and then not use the ,"true" parameter afterwords.. wow these span not only scripts but plugins, companion programs etc.....

im not sure that rich understand some of us do more with our home automation systems than hang a light bulb on a string and hook it to a remote control.....

many of our systems rival that of commercial buildings(I know my HVAC does)
-Christopher

[Krumpy]

Funny... And I was concerned with the architecture and added that as a feature back in 2004 to MLHSPlugin...

[mrhappy]

Thinking about this further aswell, with the new iPhone2.xml (and/or the device selector) then if you are showing the full list of devices in HSTouch the server has no opton but to broadcast them all for the client to pick up (hence perhaps why the client is written this way), i'm not sure what could be suggested now (other than greater control over what the selector shows) as to improve on it.

[cadillackid]

my thing is i dont even use the devices selectors.. if i used them then sure let me choose what devices i put in them.. I dont use them.. but I have lots of devices that change values often and that is choking the system down big time!!... I have huge numbers on dallas 1 wire temp sensors, bobcats on my ocelot. . i use variables back and forth on my ocelot to set and read parameters.. timers monitoring run times on A/C units, fans, and the like.. all these devices change values often but are never used in any HSTouch screen..

as krumpy mentioned with MainLobby I could select and deselect devies. so the ones i dont use dont get sent unless I need them in a ML scene.. works great.. never slow .. but I cant use Mainlobby on my iPAD!!! so I paid the big bux and got HSTouch and I STILL Cant use it on my iPAD! unless im at home..

and I still get that error in refreshdevices in the designer and all my windows clients remndering them useless.. the helpdesk ticket goes unanswered.....

if this was free Beta software id have a lot less issue but this is PAID software and not cheap software and it still doesnt work!

-Christopher

[stevene]

I have found on some of my screens variables from certain devices can really slow down the HSTouch client sometimes making it useless. I am guessing the device refresh too much or something.

I countered it by running a script that updates virtual devices with the same info every 5 seconds.

This is messy and a real pain, but it has helped once I identified which devices had been causing the issues.

Ugh.... why should I buy an upgrade that will probably have issues that don't get resolved also.

StevenE

[cadillackid]

ive been doing the same.. plus i also am putting an IF statement in each and every device value update that i do so the value or string only triggers a change to that device value or string if it actually changed rather than always update it regardless from the script.. this seems to be helping out with HSTouch. however some things are out of my control as HSTouch receives data from all devices regardless. . so if the plugin is updating all the time then the HSTouch is getting sent the changes all the time..
my ocelot was a big one, however I helped that by cutting down the number of variables on it that homeseer monitors through its plugin..

im also moving a lot of my HVAC offloaded to Micro-controllers and have it set up where homeseer wont read data from those unless a virtual device is turned on saying "poll the HVAC unit controllers".. HVAC data comprises a huge amount of my virtual devices and updates to them are frequent, however the HVAC control programs run on their own and dont need Homeseer to have 100 devices uodated all the time .. making setting those debug devices switchable has helped out a lot with the latency...
-Christopher