I have HA setup on a pi 3 with a SONOFF Universal Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus and a load of IKEA switches and bulbs. Everything was working fine for a while, and it still is mostly, but recently I’ve started noticing that sometimes press a switch and it can take up to a few seconds for the bulb to respond, usually a little while after that it’s ok again but there has been times when it’s happened quite a bit and I’ve had to reboot HA and it’s fine again for a while. I have been trying to research what it could be and I know what it could be but the task of trying all these options seems quite daunting. I know it could be one of these things?
The pi is occasionally getting overloaded with something and slowing things down and I should just upgrade to something better?
Interface from WiFi 2.4?
A fault somewhere in the zigbee network itself?
The fact I’m using ZHA and moving to mqtt could be the solution?
If anyone has any advice on the best way to start debugging this please, if there are logs and I can look at and what to look for, and how to deal with the fact that these issues only happen sometimes.
Interference from 2.4 ghz Wifi might indeed be the cause for your troubles. It is also fairly easy to check. There is a good article that explains the overlap between wifi and zigbee channels. The channel numbers don’t line up. I can’t guarantee that this is the reason but checking it does not take long so its a good place to start.
Yes. Your Pi3 is running out of it’s tiny 1Gb RAM if a HA reboot fixes it. It’s time for a hardware upgrade.
Possible too, but that wouldn’t explain your issue being resolved by a reboot. If you want to isolate the issue, the next time it lags try reloading only the ZHA integration - if it fixes the issue, then it could be a zigbee issue. If it doesn’t, then it’s most likely a RAM issue.
Also possible, but extremely unlikely. I would suggest moving to Z2M, but only after you’ve exhausted the above possibilities.
Thank you very much for this advice. I think upgrading soon is probably not a bad idea, as even if it’s not the issue, sooner or later as my system grows it’s limitations will get worse.
Just need to decide what to upgrade to now, I’m thinking of getting a NUC which seems to be a very popular option, but I also want to get a Synology NAS, should I just run in on a docker container on a NAS in that case, or is a NUC still a far better option and therefore get both? but that’s more money. I’m not sure ATM.