Is it worth getting fancy with templates for turning on/off groups?

Configuration
1

Title says it all. Lets say you have a group with 10 lights in it.

Does it make sense to just do:

- service: homeassistant.turn_off
  entity_id: group.indoor_holiday_lights

Or is it better/faster/more efficiency to use a fancy jinga to parse the list for ON devices? Like this:

- service: homeassistant.turn_off
  data_template:
      entity_id: >
          {{ states | selectattr('entity_id', 'in', state_attr('group.indoor_holiday_lights', 'entity_id')) | selectattr('state', 'eq', 'on') | map(attribute='entity_id') | list | join(', ') }}
2

I’d think group turn off is faster. All speculation though.

Edit: I know that searching all the objects is slow. Where as under the hood, the state machine uses hashing or a dictionary to quickly get things based on the entity id. That’s my only reason for my speculation

3

Well I don’t know but the second one makes my head hurt.

4

The way I see it with vs the states object:

  • group is looping through items in the group only.

  • data_template is looping through all items in the state machine and finding the on group items.

So in essence, the time difference is longer with the data_template/state machine. But in all honesty, thats on the order of milliseconds. Might be longer with slow hardware.

5

I also find that state keeping is very unreliable. Not because of HA but a device might appear off be actually be on for many many reasons. Better to just send the off signal to the things you want to be off.

6

The question is does HASS send a command if it’s state tables indicate it’s not required?

For example if a device state in HASS is off; but in reality it’s on; and you send a off command does it get sent? Or does HASS filter based on it’s understanding of state?