I have most of my “scenes” running on the ISY portal, which sends commands via Google Assistant. I moved one light scene over to the ISY and it takes about 5 seconds to execute an on/off command. If I use Google or the ISY Portal, or the ISY device it takes less than a second for the switch/scene to respond.
Does anyone know if this is a known issue?
I’m noticing the same problem. It seems like anything to do with ISY scenes is slow or inconsistent, sometimes up to almost a minute to respond.
ISY: 5.0.14
HA: 0.88.1
HASS: 1.45
I have a similar problem, my ISY is just slow to push status updates to HA. When I flip a switch that has an automation the automation sometimes doesn’t run for upwards of 30-50 seconds. Other times it’s nearly instantaneous. It’s not my automations, it’s the time it takes for the tapping of the switch to reach home assistant through ISY.
I have
ISY 5.0.15
HA 0.93.2
HASS 2.12
Wondering if there is some trick that I’m missing to make these more responsive. I have about 22 insteon lights/dimmers and about 45 automation rules on a PI 3 B+
Cheers!
Toggling lights/scenes from my HASS 0.93.2 to my ISY 5.0.XX is near instant every time. I am running my HASS instance via a docker on my unraid server. Significantly more horsepower than running it on a RPi.
What does your HA config look like for connecting to your ISY?
How do you know it is the ISY that is slow?
Not saying it isn’t…just asking how you know.
I too have an ISY and there are so many little things that get brought over to HA I started having a big slowdown.
In my case it seems that the data base was growing to over a GB and this was slowing things down.
The other thing I’ve found is where I had too many or too verbose or non responsive node servers that messed things up.
Hi @danbutter,
Thank you for responding to my post.
I think the reason I feel it’s the ISY, is because when I tail the log and watch the “ISY Node Control Events” after pressing ON or OFF at the switch or using Universal Devices Admin portal, there is sometimes a delay showing the ISY Node event. Maybe it’s a delay in HA seeing the command and writing it to the log, but I can’t be for certain.
Additionally, when I switch the lights on using the dashboard in HA, they’re nearly always instantaneous including the updating of the switch.
To clarify just a couple of things about my configuration, I have LIFX lights that are triggered by Insteon switches. Basically, I have automations that turn on the LIFX lights when the switch is activated, or when the LIFX light is turned on in the LIFX app, the state is recognized and the switches state is matched.
The whole thing works, and it’s amazing that so many technologies all dazy chained together execute, my only problem is getting to the bottom of this latency thing.
I’m looking for some advice on where I should look to try and find the root cause to my occasional slow-downs.
Actually, I think it’s Home Assistant that is “slow”. When I issue a command through the dashboard or service, it takes several seconds for it to start. If I issue a command through the ISY web interface, it’s fast. Likewise if I issue a command through the ISY portal (the my.isy.io subscription service), it’s fast.
Indeed, I have several of my devices on my.isy.io “exposed” to Google Assistant. When I say “hey google, turn on fan” Google issues a “on command to the exposed device at my.isy.io and it turns on instantly. That’s 4 “calls”. From me to Google, from Google to my.isy.io, from my.isy.io to my actual ISY, and then the ISY controlling the device.
While I suppose it might be possible to allow HA to control devices defined under my.isy.io, it would still be preferable for HA to communicate through the ISY directly. That way you wouldn’t need the portal in the first place.
I also have the ISY Subscription, but It’s currently sitting idle. I tore down my integration connection between the my.isy and Google when I moved all the automations out of the ISY into Home Assistant. Currently I have no automations running in ISY and everything is working through Home Assistant automations. Google only talks to Home Assistant which exposes all the Insteon and LIFX devices.
As a preliminary attempt, I’ve ran the commands to clean up the DB “recorder.purge” and brought the size down to about 40MB from about 1GB, hoping that will help with some performance improvements.
I’m gonna continue searching, just wanted to keep this conversation going because this product is so awesome and I’m so close to a fully functioning solution for my whole house.
If you don’t mind, can you do the following? Please try and be as exact and as thorough as possible.
Pick a single Insteon light switch to test out the various control methods. For example, my test switch is named 1STA1 - PORCH LIGHT and it is a 2476D “Switchlinc Dimmer” v37 with address 12.21.21. This switch controls a single load, unsurprisingly my porch light.
Make sure that this switch is appearing in your entity registry. Mine is called light.1sta1_porch_light.
In your ISY Portal, select “Connectivity” and “Google Home”. Click “Device” and select the light you chose in the drop down list. Make sure the Google Home Category is set to “Lights”. Leave “Room” blank. Under “Spoken” choose a word you know is unique in your system. I used Foobar.
Still in the ISY Portal, select “Connectivity” and “IFTTT / Webhooks”. Click “Set Key” and if you don’t already have a key defined, click “Create Key”. YOU ONLY HAVE TO DO THIS ONCE!!! This key is unique to YOUR portal and is the same for every event you create. The only time you would ever change it is if your key somehow got compromised. Click “Device” and then under “Event Name” put enter “FoobarOff”, and under “Device” and choose the device you are testing. Change “Action” to Off.
Repeat the last step, but for the Event Name call it “FoobarOn”, and of course make the action “On”.
You should now see these two “events”. Next to the red X, there is an icon with a square and an arrow coming out of it. Click on that for each event and save them in notepad. You should be able to paste either of them in a browser and your test light should turn on/off almost immediately. These “webhook links” send a command to the ISY Portal (my.isy.io) and if you provided a valid key, it will look for a matching event name (that you just created) and execute the event. Although this has “ifttt” in the URL you don’t need to use IFTTT to call it, as you just demonstrated by pasting the link into a browser. Note: These URLs are oddly enough, case sensitive.
Now go to the services page in HA. This is the first icon on the left under “developer tools”. Under “Service” enter light.turn_off or light.turn_on And under “Entity” enter your HA entity id for your test light (in my case light.1sta1_porch_light) and then hit “Call Service”. If nothing happens, wait 10 seconds before hitting it again. For me it takes roughly 5 seconds before the light changes.
Add the following to your configuration.yaml and replace the URLs with the ones you saved to clipboard. Remember, the URLs are case sensitive, so paste them exactly from what you saved in the clipboard.
rest_command:
foobar_on:
url: 'https://my.isy.io/api/ifttt/FoobarOn/key/<secret key>'
foobar_off:
url: 'https://my.isy.io/api/ifttt/FoobarOff/key/<secret key>'
Restart HA (otherwise these won’t appear in HA) and go back to the services tab. rest_command.foobar_off and rest_command.foobar_on should now appear in the “Service” drop down list. Select either of them —sometimes you have to click on the service name instead of typing it in, so I just paste rest_command.foo and that brings up both services and then I click on the one I want. The click “Call Service”. Like pasting the URL into a browser, the light changes status almost immediately .
By using the services debugging tool, you’ve just controlled the same light switch from HA, first by using the ISY component which takes several seconds for it to change the light state, and second by having HA call the ISY Portal webhook, which happened almost instantly.
It seems obvious the problem is not with the ISY, because the Portal (and even HA sending a command to the Portal) has no delay. This is a pretty strong indication that the delay is happening inside the ISY Component.
Pinging @OverloadUT @rccoleman as they probably have some insights.
I few months ago I also was having slow responses for isy commands.
Coincidentally, I did a restore to my plm which cleared up all my issues with hassio-isy.
HTH.
I will try those commands this weekend. For today I did a PLM reset, then re-linked all the insteon devices based on the feedback from @julianl which seemed like another good hardware place to check. So far I can’t tell if it’s the same/better/worse.
It won’t make a difference. I’m thinking of using something like node-red to build a list of sensors and expose those to HA and use restful commands, which I believe are fast,
Another update on this thread… To see if it’s a horsepower issue with the PI, I created an Ubuntu server 18.04 in a VM in virtualbox on my core i5 Macbook, should be plenty of horsepower with 6 cores and I gave it 6GB of RAM.
After I configured the ISY, and the LIFX, I ran into noticeably the same issue, delays in switch state being registered/relayed to HA and sometimes it would just miss the state changes all together.
To simulate I added two automations, one for ON and one for OFF. When I press the wall switch, the ISY should receive the switch change, then update HA, HA should then run the automation and turn on the LIFX lights. The whole thing works, but repeated on/off on/off eventually results in an “on for the switch”, but no relay of that switch status to HA.
In conclusion since I can re-create the same behavior with significantly more powerful hardware, I’m sufficiently convinced it’s not the power of the PI or possibly HA, but instead the consistency in which the state of the lights communicated from ISY to HA which occasionally causes the delay.
I’m running the 5.x version on the ISY, which is not yet their stable release, maybe there is a little slow-down with this yet released version of ISY?
Just looking for any other ideas on where the inconsistency might be coming from.
Thank you in advance!
I’ve been a longtime ISY user. There is no such thing as a “stable” release. I know the try really hard over there and have great customer service, but their software lifecycle is a little on the rough side. And the big problem is that damn Java console. They should have dumped it years ago. It has one albeit extremely useful function: It creates “N way” groups for insteon switches like no one else. This is so all of the switches can operate independently from a controller. But I must say I’m really impressed with their portal. I just wish that would replace the admin console.
I have to agree. Google Assistant linked to the ISY Portal controls devices almost instantly. If only HA could connect to the ISY the way the ISY Portal connects to the ISY…
@FurureTense: No problems here lately, even my ISY connected X10 devices showed back up in HA (they were MIA for quite awhile).
So in light of the discussion above: I have most of my lighting programmed on the ISY (for Insteon/X10) devices), the HA (mostly with Node Red) has taken over more and more automation duties since I now have more Tasmota and Wyze devices, etc. The ISY can control some of the “HA Only” devices as well with network resourced REST calls to HA. So in short, it’s becoming a convoluted mess that I’m not happy with.
Question: Has anyone else been down this road? Does it make sense to do all automation on HA and relegate the ISY to just an Insteon/X10 gateway?
It’s tough isn’t it? I had quite a few automations in the ISY when I got HA to work reliably.
I just a week or so ago made automations in HA to replace all of my node servers so I can unplug the Pi I’ve had running them on for years now.
I’ve duplicated my notify programs that I’ve had on the ISY since I use telegram with HA and that is much faster and better than an email to a text which is what I was using on ISY.
On the other hand the styles are different and things you can program in the ISY you may be able to accomplish with HA, but you need to learn a new way to do it.
If you think the reliability of your HA setup is as good as your ISY then I don’t see a reason to keep the programs only on it.
I think I’ll leave things in my ISY for a while, but if all you are looking for is insteon control you can even use the old hub with HA. Don’t really need the ISY at all. What you lose is your comfort level. Good luck!
How is the speed of controlling from HA a scene on the ISY? It still takes 5 seconds for me.
The busiest scene I have has 5 devices (2 Insteons, 3 others that follow the Insteons via an ISY program) and it’s all pretty instantaneous.