There is this icon with two opposing arrows that indicates whether Z-Wave JS UI’s websocket is connected or disconnected.
On my phone the icon flashes red so much that I can barely do anything in Z-Wave JS UI. On my desktop it still flashes red but way less. I can’t figure out what causes it to flash red and what it really means other than the obvious.
Can anyone share troubleshooting tips on how to make the connection more reliable? What can be causing issues? Both HA and Z-Wave JS UI are running in the same Proxmox VM. Why does the blinking red icon issue get worse when I am on my mobile phone (Samsung S20 Ultra) on my wifi network?
Are you using keymaster by any chance? I was running it and was getting websocket errors in my home assistant logs, and it was crashing node red too. It seems like it was overwhelming the websockets. I Uninstalled keymaster and my issues went away.
If not keymaster, something is likely overwhelming your websockets. It could be some other custom component. You can try disabling custom components and see if the issue goes away.
If it continues, you might be better off installing zwavejsui outside the vm. I run zwavejsui in docker and dont use the addon. I’m not too familiar with proxmox, but it appears you can create an lxc container just for zwavejsui. This may eliminate some of the added layers and problems created by running a dockerized environment (ie home assistant supervised) in VM.
The command to create the lxc container is here- under “zigbee - zwave”
The use of an add-on is a new piece of information. The ZUI maintainer cannot help if the add-on itself is the issue. I would also do as @mwav3 has suggested and try using a non-addon solution to eliminate that as the problem.
You could also expose port 8091 in the add-on configuration and try using it directly, instead of via HA’s Ingress.
@mwav3 I am indeed using Keymaster! I actually just use it to keep 6 codes sync’d on my 3 locks. I know it is not the developer’s fault but wish there were an equivalent (even more basic version) that doesn’t create an insane amount of entities, automations, etc. I actually never even tried to use HA’s automations because it was such a mess to deal with keymaster’s default automations I just stay out of there. I do everything in NR. Speaking of NR, I need to see if I can accomplish the syncing in NR so I can just remove keymaster. What is keymaster doing to overwhelm the system given I just have it sync my codes (no schedule, or notifications).
Speaking of overwhelming the system… maybe what is the issue is ESPHome devices that are sending back too much data to HA. Do they use websockets or the same mechanism that may interfere with ZWaveJSUI’s websocket?
I have been having issues with the Android app freezing up on me relatively often and I occasionally see the “Connecting…” when not rebooting but have never figured out what causes it. I did get the feeling though that when I am developing a new ESPHome based device and jack up the reporting so I can debug the system, things get worse. What strikes me though is that when I look at CPU usage, and data flow it all looks quite low especially compared to the “power” of the overall hardware running all of this. The worse offender in terms of resource hog is RTSP-to-web which I often find sitting at 30% of CPU according to Glances. Right now it is using 17% and 1.2GB of RAM (I think a recent update reduced its resource hunger). A reboot of HA often fixes the performance issues.
I will look into this. I have already made my smart home setup relatively complicated and was hoping to avoid increasing complexity. Restoring the HA VM is quite easy thanks to the backup but if I start separating the pieces I am afraid it would be a lot harder to recover from disaster. My Proxmox backup strategy is likely faulty and incomplete so if anything fails I am in trouble. I actually have 2 Lenovo Tiny PC m920q as the plan was full redundancy but have not researched/implemented that yet…
The android app, node red, and zwavejs all use websockets. I think esphome does too but i dont use it- im still using tasmota with mqtt. Websockets have a limit as to how many connections can be maintained before its overwhelmed.
Keymaster has a bunch of automations going back and forth over zwave. I’m not sure exactly what it does, but it definitely generated a log error about the websockets when i tried it and crashed node red on me.
I would disable keymaster first and see if it solves your issues before making any other big changes.
You can set codes with a simple call service automation, either in Home assistant or node red
