Zigbee Suddenly Is Very Slow After 2024.2.1

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1

I’m wondering if anyone else is experiencing this, but since updating to 2024.2.1 my Zigbee network is totally unresponsive after a reboot. I fiddled around last night with channels on both wifi and Zigbee, rebooted a dozen times, moved the Zigbee dongle to a different port - all of that did nothing but suddenly after about 2 hours it was all working again.

I’m wondering if it’s my Zigbee stick so I ordered an exact copy of it just in case. Has anyone successfully migrated from on Sonoff 3.0 Dongle to another? I’ve never tried it and don’t want to have to re-pair dozens of devices if I can avoid it.

To answer some of the questions that are likely to arise:

  • Yes, my dongle is on an extension and plugged into a powered USB hub
  • My HAOS is running on a VMWare virtual machine and has been successfully for quite some time
  • No, nothing new has been added between a perfectly running Zigbee network and this now very problematic one

I downgraded to 2024.1.6 but the problem persists - making me question either the dongle is going bad (18 mo old) or the new changes with ZHA to allow for updating firmware somehow modified something in the ZHA config, the tables or something that now is causing this issue.

I have not yet tried to restore a backup from a few days ago as I did add a couple new scripts and didn’t want them inactive, but that’s my next step to see if that clears anything up.

Essentially every Zigbee device gets an error:

Failed to call service light/turn_on. Failed to send request: Request failed after 5 attempts: <Status.MAC_NO_ACK: 233>

and

Failed to call service light/turn_on. Failed to send request: Request failed after 5 attempts: <Status.MAC_CHANNEL_ACCESS_FAILURE: 225>

I also noticed two of my temperature sensors fell off the network last night but when I woke them up and went into ZHA I tried to add a device to see what would happen and it detected them and the original entities were all fine again.

Definitely odd behavior happening. If it is the dongle I hope someone can confirm the process to migrate to a new radio :slight_smile:

2 Likes
2

I accidentaly flased esp firmware on my zigbee stick. Bought new one plug it in and everything worked. All devices and settings are stored in zigbee2mqtt db, so there shouldnt be a problem.

3

Thanks for the response, but I use ZHA.

4

Sorry texting from mob

5

It’s gone from bad to worse. While I used to see all Zigbee connected (but unresponsive), now after recent attempts to fix this they are all unavailable.

  • Took a backup of Zigbee (ZHA)
  • Migrated the radio to the new dongle, that’s when everything went unavailable
  • Tried migrating back to the original dongle, no difference
  • Restored a backup to before I migrated the radios, no difference
  • Restored a backup from a week ago, no difference
  • Used the new dongle and created an entirely new network to see if it would re-add the devices one-by-one (without re-pairing, this has happened before where a device went away and “adding” brought it back to normal even though it was already there)
  • Put everything back to normal and re-updated to 2024.2.1, all battery devices seem to work, all mains devices do not yet I can add a new device without any issue - oddly, when I did this I also got notified that one of my battery devices had a new firmware available (ThirdReality), so Zigbee works and I can add new devices but the old mains devices are shot
  • As a test I removed a switch that wasn’t working from Zigbee and then attempted to re-add it and it did not re-add, although I did not yet try to factory reset that device (the horror of doing this for my entire network gives me heartburn!

Stranger than fiction. Two different dongles, two different extension cables - I can add new Zigbee main devices and all my battery operated devices work but none of my existing devices work.

Now my Zigbee network is almost totally dead and appears to be unfixable - presumably without putting every device back in pairing mode and starting over.

6

Any chance of 2.4Ghz interference? That would be my first thought for MAC_CHANNEL_ACCESS_FAILURE. If the channel is never clear, you’ll get this. Maybe some 2.4Ghz device is broken to the point of monopolizing the channel? Going be hard to troubleshoot without a spectrum analyzer, or powering everything off. Especially hard if it’s a neighbor’s device.

7

I’m certainly not discounting it at all, but I have changed both the Zigbee and my Access Point channels more times than I can count now and to no effect.

Although, now that I’ve let it sit for about 2 hours then I decided to change channels again, I’m seeing some of my devices come back online. Odd since I changed channels before without anything happening.

8

Most certainly NOT solved as I thought. I changed channels and it worked for almost a day, then everything went offline. ZHA warned me that the settings changed and asked if I wanted to restore them so I did and it all worked again - for 3 hours. Now no amount of channel changing is doing anything.

I threw on the new dongle and migrated the radio in case this is all just hardware failure but no love yet, it’s still offline. I’m kind of at the end of my rope, not sure what else I can do.

9

So, this is interesting as I’m experience what seems to be something similar, although I’m using Zigbee2MQTT and as Raspberry Pi 4 with a Zigbee Pi Hat. Things have been working fine for the past month. I did add 3 new 2.4GHz WiFi smart switches a week ago but there were no issues with my Zigbee network at all. I upgraded HAOS & Home Assistant Supervisor and 1 Zigbee mini switch basically fell off the network. I attempted to fix it only to find that I couldn’t re-add it after I removed it.

Then things went from bad to worse. Now my entire Zigbee network is unresponsive. I haven’t changed my WiFi setup as it was already setup so that my Wifi was on 802.11 channels 6 & 11 while keeping my Zigbee network on Zigbee channel 11. I can see I have neighbors that have WiFi running on 802.11 channel 1 but it’s been that way from what I can remember and the signal level shouldn’t be enough to make this no longer functional. I tried removing and re-adding a mains powered smart plug that is like 5 feet from the Raspberry Pi and it never comes up as discovered when turning on rejoin.

I’m not using ZHA so unfortunately I don’t think either of us are going to be of much help to each other. It sure seems like the latest HA update broken something related to Zigbee somehow. Unfortunately without it affecting everyone I’m at a loss. I’m about ready to order a USB stick and try migrating it all over, though repairing mains devices is going to be a real pain.

10

I don’t think it is at all dissimilar to my issue. It all comes down to changing channels. I went, literally, one by one until I found a channel that lit my network back up - starting from 25 and working backwards and found 19 to currently be my sweet spot. Same wifi networks in my house, the same around me (unless someone upgraded to a strong mesh, which is possible) and so far it’s holding but last time it only held for a day or so.

And I did reference the charts about overlap between wifi and Zigbee, that didn’t help me zero in on the right channel, which makes a neighbor even more likely to me since I’ve also replaced my dongle.

11

I reading more it does sound like USB3 causes massive interference, which my Raspberry Pi 4 is using USB 3 for the external SSD, but it was this way from the start when I moved to the Raspberry Pi 4, from a Raspberry Pi 3, last month. I decided to bite the bullet and order a Sonoff Zibgee 3.0 USB stick and extension cable in the hopes to bring things back. Since I’ll have to rebuild my Zigbee network I may also re-evaluated my WiFi network and move things around. I’ve been using this Zigbee Pi Hat for like a couple of years and it’s been pretty solid until now. :frowning:

12

OK, so after pulling out my phone to scan the WiFi signals again I totally missed some neighbor’s WiFi router is super strong and saturating the Zigbee channel 11 spectrum. I don’t know if this is actually new or what, and it rather frustrates me to no end that I’m stuck in a situation of being at the mercy of my neighbor’s WiFi blasting out everywhere. I sort of wish there was a way I could line the perimeter of my lot with WiFi signal cancellation. It’s not really an option for my to attempt to protect just my home exterior walls as I have both a smart doorbell and smart floodlight that need WiFi access.

We’ll see what comes of the Sonoff Zigbee stick on a USB extension and setting up my network again. I’m tempted to move one of my WiFi access points over to 802.11 channel 1 to free up spectrum for Zigbee on another channel, however, I suspect most everyone else in my neighborhood just has their WiFi setup to auto-channel selection and they will just move over top of Zigbee once again.

I’m starting to wonder if I ought to consider moving away from Zigbee but I’m not sure what good alternatives are for things like temperature/humidity & door/window sensors, not to mention battery operated switches.

13

Just FYI, you can download the diagnostics for the ZHA integration and see the utilization of each Zigbee channel.

image
image1258×531 39 KB

The log, download to energy_scan. Lower is better.

    "energy_scan": {
      "11": 48.23529411764706,
      "12": 37.64705882352941,
      "13": 47.05882352941177,
      "14": 20.0,
      "15": 47.05882352941177,
      "16": 47.05882352941177,
      "17": 49.411764705882355,
      "18": 51.76470588235294,
      "19": 40.0,
      "20": 42.35294117647059,
      "21": 44.705882352941174,
      "22": 52.94117647058823,
      "23": 52.94117647058823,
      "24": 32.94117647058823,
      "25": 7.0588235294117645,
      "26": 32.94117647058823
    },

Edit: I’m on 20. Looks like I should consider a move to 25.

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I found 25 to be problematic in my system. And I did use diagnostics and used low utilization channels with little help.

15

So I just migrated myself to the Sonoff Dongle-P tonight and all of my issues seemingly disappeared. I was able to recover all of my devices from my Zigbee Pi HAT to the Sonoff without issue. I didn’t even have to end up going around and repairing everything. I didn’t change my Zigbee channel, since that will require repairing everything, which some of my mains powered device will be a real PITA. I’m going to run with things to see how things pan out. I did also flash the latest Z-Stack on the Sonoff just to reduce any other potential issues. The Sonoff is also on a USB extension a few feet away from the RPi. If everything goes to pot again like what happened to @CO_4X4 I’ll report back.

16

20220922 or 20221226 are generally seem more consistent than 20230507.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, but something to be aware of if you start to get network table full errors.

1 Like
17

This issue might be related to Cannot get any Zigbee devices to stay online (ZHA)

I have a feeling that some incompatibility has arisen is a recent update (but it would be a lot of work to prove it).

18

All my connectivity issues disappeared when I switched from the E to the Sonoff Dongle-P as well.
I was pulling my hair out. Had tried everything with the E.

1 Like
19

Has this been resolved? Or did you guys give up?

I’ve started seeing similar things over the last few days… I’ve restored a backup of HA but still seeing lots of “Failed to send request: Failed to deliver message: <EmberStatus.DELIVERY_FAILED: 102”…

20

As daft as this might sound… I was suffering from this error for some weeks. I noticed that the problematic Sonoff TRV didn’t have an area assigned to it. Once one was added the problem went away. ymmv of course