ZigBee network sluggish

I’m using deCONZ as an addon in my Home Assistant OS installation on an x86 PC, and I’m using a ConBeeII as ZigBee interface.

For a long time my network of devices has worked fairly well. I’ve not added any devices lately that I can remember, I’ve just kept installing updates on my system as they come.

But suddenly my ZigBee network has become very sluggish. I’m switching between night mode in the evening and day mode in the morning, at which point both ZigBee devices, Z-Wave devices and WiFi-devices are set to new values. But now I see that some ZigBee bulbs are not changing states/values.

Also, in my son’s room I have a couple of IKEA Traadfri dimmer switches controlling his roof light and his bed light. And now I have to press multiple times before anything happens. The switch event handling are handled in deCONZ and configured using the Switch editor on light groups. So Home Assistant shouldn’t cause problems here, I think…

And now the interesting thing: I was looking at the system now, pressing the IKEA switch while looking at the states in Phoscon and Home Assistant. And everything was as sluggish as is has been lately. But then I found the events log in Phoscon, and started monitoring switch evens. And after a few presses the system started reacting on every button press. As if opening the events log updated message subscriptions or something.

But I’m completely blank here on how I should troubleshoot this further. Any idea what I should do next?

One thing that might help is to disable automatic OTA updates in the
Phoscon App > Settings > Gateway > Advanced tab.

I’ve have seen in another users HA setup that the OTA files for Ikea and others were downloaded by a HA script to the “otau” directory, which is quite nice but some devices had problems updating and basically OTA was running all the time making everything sluggish.

(in the deCONZ GUI you can spot devices currently updating if they have green color instead yellow or grey)

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I think I might have found a cause to the sluggishness problems. I remembered I had semi-recently mounted an Ubiquiti Unifi nanoHD access point mounted to the roof of the hallway directly outside my sons room. I tried unplugging the access point, and suddenly everything started reacting as snappy as they did earlier.

So it seems the access point was jamming the ZigBee signals or interfering with them in some way.

Question is, what can I do about this? I need the access point to improve the wifi coverage in my house. But not at the expense of the ZigBee network. Isn’t possible to get the two networks to not interfere with each other?

Thank you for the tip! OTAU was already disabled, I saw. But I found out the problem was caused by interference between ZigBee and Wi-Fi.

I’ve followed this guide to plan the channel usage on both networks.

I have a Unifi Dream Machine on 2.4GHz Wi-Fi channel 6, a Unifi nanoHD access point on channel 1 (to distance it frequency-wise from ZigBee), and now ZigBee on channel 25.

So time will tell if the situation improves. :slight_smile:

Indeed interference would also be my next suggestion to check, in the logs this is often indicated by errors with 0xE1 (MAC channel access failure).

Beside WiFi Bluetooth streaming might also be worth to check.

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Can you share some logs? Please check #deconz to find out how to make logs.

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As far as I can see logging is not on by default and needs to be enabled first. Currently it looks like the problem is resolved after I set fixed channels on my access points and in Phoscon. So I’m not sure if I can get logs that are of interest now.

If the problem surfaces again I will capture logs and share them.