Homekit items are unresponsive

I’m starting to use OH3, with deConz (Raspbee II, operating ok), z-wave (Zwave.me not yet initialized), and RFXComm (TRX433E, mainly Energenie and Oregon, with a touch of Anslut and ARC). Many of these things are being exposed over HAP for Homekit. This is a new system for me too; however, I am not a new hand to this I’ve been using Domoticz for years. So far, with OH3, I’m well impressed. It’s vastly superior to the performance of Domoticz and with Homekit integration, I wouldn’t have to run my own software to integrate with Homekit. I have never been much of a fan of “home bridge” either, also generally because of poor performance.

Responses are instantaneous, no more waiting for a second or two…Seemingly, no more misfires, but this is a new deployment, so time living with it and using is the only true testament.

I currently have around 30 items exposed over HomeKit (zigbee and 433mhz items), I expect this to more than double over the coming weeks as I get Z-Wave moving.

Now to the point, Homekit Integration fails for me too. I have it running in parallel with an existing system that is stable and runs for months without interruption (Domoticz is the master manager). I am in the process of duplicating an existing system, the one I intend to replace. So far in its 2/3 days of deployment, I have had to restart the server every morning. A restart solves it, but a restart is required. Now, this is a real shame because everything else is ticking away happily, there is nothing present in the tail log to suggest something has gone awry.

I intend to run ZWave door locks through this, so I can’t afford to run a system that might become unresponsive at the drop of a hat.

Just to re-enforce the investigation level:

  • firewall rules
    – no, there is a current installation working
  • bad networking connection / unstable access points
    – no, there is a current installation working
  • apple tv/ipad/homepod configured as homekit bridge but got disconnected
    – no, there is a current installation working
  • usage of IPv6 or changing Ip address (often in combination with docker)
    – no, there is a current installation working
  • race condition bug in mDNS library we use
    – what’s this?
  • sleep mode of openHAB server (cannot reconnect after the sleep mode)
    – what’s this?
  • missing rights to write jsondb/homekit.json that stores information of connected items
    – I’m updating this regularly over the course of a day as I configure the system, so this is unlikely
  • homekit.json got lost/overwritten
    – no, a configuration is present, correct, and works (when it’s responsive)
  • memory
    – no, Not much happening, 3% CPU. It’s running at 400MB of 4GB and I have a swap file of 1TB. I’m ‘htopping’ on a regular basis to check for load and leakage. I have seen memory growth of around 6/8MB from start-up over 4 hours this morning. I would expect that growth to level out; to continue growing would constitute a small memory leak and you will eventually run out of memory, regardless of how much you have.

Anybody got any ideas?