Getting 15 seconds of "server busy" every minute, on the minute...

Community Playground General Discussions
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This is with a Vera2, running 1.1.1362. But I saw the same behavior with 1.1.1338–upgraded in the (silly) hope that this might have been one of things that had been addressed.

I am pretty sure this has to do with my darned HRSD1s. I have four of them (and would love to replace them with something better). One is a direct hop from Vera, and that one seems pretty stable. I am not seeing anything like the battery life I used to see from these things with UI2, and suspect it may be due to some drastic change in the polling strategy MCV is using for them in later firmware versions.

The other three are out in my garage, and require a hop. When I first moved to the V2, I added these and they were fine for a day, and then Vera exiled them on the first “automatic nightly heal”. I opened a trouble ticket, turned on tech support, things went for a month or so, no real change, occasional mail from MCV. I left on vacation for three weeks, and when I came back, decided I would attack them myself. Removed them from the network, re-added, re-configured, set up manual routes for them, and set them not to be configured by Vera. Everything worked fine for about a week. I disabled tech support, as I had heard nothing from MCV in a month, and figured my stuff had gotten shoved to the back burner and had fallen off the stove.

While on vacation, I had become annoyed with my existing Square Connect setup–my device names were a bit too long and too descriptive, and were spilling out of the SQC widgets. So the other thing I did when I got home was a fairly substantial amount of device name shortening. After that was done, I found that Vera seemed confused about communication with some of the renamed devices, and started showing stale state for them. This may be unrelated to what I am seeing now, but it was the first sign of trouble. It could also have been that my HRSD1s were beginning to thrash the system. Dunno.

Two days ago, two of the garage sensors went from showing reasonable status to showing stale battery readings. I have replaced the batteries in one (I am using Eneloops, but if the darned things are only going to last 4-5 days, am not sure what I’ll do), and will replace the other’s as soon as I have a set of three batteries get reconditioned and charged.

Last night, the dusk scenes failed to execute. I ran them by hand, and they started everything up fine, but the state of the devices in UI4 didn’t show that consistently. We went to bed, and the “lights out” sequences failed to execute. I had noticed the frequent “server busy” popups, and last night had figured one of them had the system tied up when the scenes should have started.

Closer examination this morning shows that I am really getting 15-20 seconds of “server busy” at the top of each minute. I am guessing that this pretty much torpedos any scene fired off a timer, since I currently have those starting on even minutes. It also seems to be keeping Vera from ascertaining correct device status. I can turn a device on or off that is showing stale status, and the UI will reflect the change (and the change happens), but then the “server busy” even happens, and it looks like because polling got blocked or something, the UI reverts to showing the old, stale status it was showing before.

Highly annoying, and makes the system nearly useless. I have added a 16G USB stick to the system, enabled logging to that and enabled verbose logging. Sure as the world, I am seeing a hailstorm of chatter that starts right at the even minute and runs 15-20 seconds, and then things go pretty quiet. I am seeing something in each pile complaining that node 36 is “bad”…it’s a Leviton fan controller that I renamed but had to delete, re-add, and reconfigure before it started showing accurate status. Vera seems to have concocted some pretty fanciful “auto-routes” for it–the device is perhaps 8 feet away from Vera. But that device is now showing a “1” for CommFailure, so perhaps it’s contributing to the trouble.

Don’t know. Has anyone seen anything like this? I have seen the odd post from Florin, but doubt that MCV is going to get back to me before next week, even if I open a trouble ticket.

–Richard

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Difficult to say without taking a look at the logs. One thing I would recommend though is to ditch the HRDS1s and maybe think about integrating something from an Alarm instead!
I gave up on my two HRDS1s due to battery usage and one of them dropping its configuration!

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[quote=“strangely, post:2, topic:169622”]Difficult to say without taking a look at the logs. One thing I would recommend though is to ditch the HRDS1s and maybe think about integrating something from an Alarm instead!
I gave up on my two HRDS1s due to battery usage and one of them dropping its configuration![/quote]

Well, putting fresh batteries in the last HRSD1 appears to have made this cease…I am no longer getting the every-minute server-busy popup, and the UI is reflecting the actual state of the house. It is unfortunate that there’s not another, more stable Z-wave dry contact sensor. And it’s really a shame that these things eat batteries so quickly!

–Richard

EDIT: I was wrong. It had stopped for a bit, but now appears to be back. Sigh.

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The battery usage never used to be this way. Not sure what changed but I used to get about 6 months or more out of mine, but I’m lucky now if one of them lasts 2 weeks.

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So I performed some scatology on the logs, and decided it looked like it was, in fact, the garage sensors that were rocking the boat. My V2 sits on the kitchen counter–it’ll move some day, but for now, it’s where I can keep an eye on it. From the unit to the nearest door sensor, it’s probably only 30 feet, but it’s through a couple walls. The furthest is another 45 feet or so away from Vera. In the garage, I have a GE/Jasco appliance module (being used to power-cycle a Foscam every night at 2am–the silly thing falls off the network after a while if I don’t) and an Intermatic outdoor appliance module, being used to cycle a power strip feeding a raft of chargers for drills and yard tools. These two devices are nodes #21 and #22.

I had the Intermatic set as the route for the nearest doors, and the GE/Jasco as the route for the furthest. So in “manual routing” under advanced Z-wave options, the route for the near doors was “22”, and for the far one “21”.

Clearing these out made the “server busy” (which the logs showed ending each time with LuaPNP crash!) go away. Adding it back in to any of them made it resume. In reading the trail of bread-crumbs about manual routing on the fora, it looks like I have the format right on these. But in looking at the advanced tab for these devices, they don’t have an “auto-route” value. Could this be as simple as the devices not supporting routing? Is the routing info only used by the end device? I would have expected it to be used largely by Vera and the intervening device(s)?

–Richard

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FYI on the battery usage of the HRDS1 - They are very easy to hardwire.

I had one hooked up to a motion detector to activate my exterior motion light, as well as to tie-in to some other scenes I had created. The dumb thing was eating batteries, about 1 set every 3 weeks, even with the settings changed to a minimum number of polls, so I figured I’d try and hardwire.

The easiest thing to do is to get an old Motorola phone charger. The plug isn’t the mini-usb type used now (rated at 5V), but the old plastic “fork” design Motorola used to use. The output on those is rated at 4.6V DC. Just drill two tiny holes in the HRDS1 housing and solder on some wires to the battery terminals, then connect to the plug-in charger transformer. I completed this yesterday, and as of this AM, it’s working fine. Battery level on the HRDS1 is showing 100%, and it’s working. It only took me ~20 minutes or so to do this.

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[quote=“Floor61, post:6, topic:169622”]FYI on the battery usage of the HRDS1 - They are very easy to hardwire.

I had one hooked up to a motion detector to activate my exterior motion light, as well as to tie-in to some other scenes I had created. The dumb thing was eating batteries, about 1 set every 3 weeks, even with the settings changed to a minimum number of polls, so I figured I’d try and hardwire.

The easiest thing to do is to get an old Motorola phone charger. The plug isn’t the mini-usb type used now (rated at 5V), but the old plastic “fork” design Motorola used to use. The output on those is rated at 4.6V DC. Just drill two tiny holes in the HRDS1 housing and solder on some wires to the battery terminals, then connect to the plug-in charger transformer. I completed this yesterday, and as of this AM, it’s working fine. Battery level on the HRDS1 is showing 100%, and it’s working. It only took me ~20 minutes or so to do this.[/quote]

My HRSD1s are affixed to garage doors with tilt-switches across the dry contacts. So without changing that (and I may), hardwire is off the table.

–Richard

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Any updates on Vera’s manual routing?

I noticed that when I put a manual route for some of my devices, an action on that device will crash vera (The problem might not appear right away for some devices but after a few days). There’s something funny about these manual routes and very little documentation available.
I wish MCV would shed some light about these settings because sometimes they can be very useful as auto routing is not that reliable.
Roy.