Maybe I’m a little naive about how folks are using this software but is it surprising to anyone but me that if you have 500 items, the user interface might not be lighting fast?
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I moved all the items into the group and got it working with the plugin. Can’t yet say if it’s better on the tablets - will get a feel for that over the next few days. However, this is pretty telling -
Default Items
Filtered Items
Generation of the items is a bit slower but the size of the data shows how much noise is removed. 72% less. That has to make a difference on low-end tablets which run the browser 24/7.
Likewise, the filtered events, after 60 seconds generated 47k and the non-filtered generated 78k files.
This would be exaggerated when I put all my other items which update frequently back in which I removed to find performance problems.
Thanks for the plugin! This should be a default option with HABPanel. 
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500 items isn’t much when you’ve automated the entire home. Running it on the latest hardware and it’s the switching of dashboards that’s always been sluggish.
That I have no problem believing Kris, what I’m wondering is if I walk up to a tablet interface anywhere in said home, Do I really need access to all 500 or even a fraction of those
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Maybe not, but even adding 250 nodes into a group isn’t an overly efficient way of doing it. Not that I can think of another way.
Yepp, same here, hence the plugin was born. Have around 1500 items in my home and believe me habpanel was slow before … now ot is blazing fast and my WAF (Wife Acceptability Factor of the home automation) went sky rocketing
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Are there instructions to set this up, ie what group name etc?
You are welcome.
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events-filtered and events differ as well, if you check the contents you would see that events-filtered sends the full item as part of the update package and events sends just the changed value.
On a side note, does anyone now what is the difference and when one or another is used for these statuses:
ItemStateChangedEvent
ItemStateEvent
ItemUpdatedEvent
GroupItemStateChangedEvent
The thing is, I think we need to use only ItemUpdatedEvent (to filter out), thus removing the biggest portion of the update stream, however habpanel was filtering the other statuses previously as well - so I am not sure.
I understand what you´re saying, but in my opinion 500 items isnt much.
The problem with habpanel is more a design issue… Ask yourself, if 500 items makes a system slow, why is habpanel then designed to read all 500 items, if the user is only using alot less in his habpanel.
This is why the hack was made by arctus. And his hack is ofcouse an obvious hack to the design problem of habpanel…
But the hack doesnt really fix the problem (habpanel beeing sluggish) after all. Cause if the user uses all items in his habpanel, then the hack wont do any good after all. It only help if the user is not using all his items.
I think habpanel needs to be redesigned to handle alot of items better, (should/might be thousands of items) in a better way… Mayby some buffering or something… (I´m not sure how).
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Thats your decision when you build your panel and design your smart home. And it´s quite individual. Mayeb you dont need to use all 500 items. But anotherone might need it, and maybe even more than that…
I havn´t counted how may items I use. But my plans for my smart home will probably turn into several hundreds items needed.
The question is: Should you be limited (having a bad result) because of the amount of items in habpanel? I my opinion, no.
That is how it should be.
The add-in does help because it does less. In reality though, the item-interact-with/non-interacting-item ratio would be, IMHO, low. So this add-on simply breathes some life into HABPanel. It won’t be long though.
Ideally, and I know I could do this if I knew how - it is after all, open-source, each page on each panel should subscribe to items it knows it needs to display. Each of my pages, and I ±102 spread over 3 panels, only displays around 10-15 items. I have one page which displays battery state of all the sensors around the house. I only care to look at that once in a blue moon. No point in it subscribing to any updates if it’s not opened in 6 months.
Maybe it’s time I tried to write some code and change how it works 
Not if you use all your items in habpanel… Thats my point.
I’m agreeing with you
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Actually plugin will still be good in this case as well - it does filter event stream as well based on event type on openhab site, so in theory it would still be useful
I have also thought about how the system should be properly designed and unfortunately there is no silver bullet. Subscription based system would create a large overhead on openhab if your tablets will be showing different content (not same page). Either way, this solution is best that we can have at the moment.
Hmm I sure have to test this one of these days…
You´re probably right… I wouldnt know. I´m just a simple user, with big wishes 
I must say, that this solution resolved a lot of my issues! Of course habpanel works now very well with my 6 tablets. Finally it is responsible and useable!
Moreover it resolved my problem with Out of Memory issue (out of Java Heap space)! Perhaps the root cause of the issue with Heap space is somewhere else, however it doesn’t change the fact it just stopped happening when I started filtering items going to habpanel.
For now i filtered most of the items and I wonder how many of items I can let go through the filter and not slow down habpanel.
Anyway, It definitely has to become default option of habpanel.
Glad it helped
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I tried it. It stopped HABpanel working and seemed to cause other problems too.
Please, as it’s not particularly clear reading through the thread, can someone confirm the following:
- Does this work with stable release 2.4 ?
- If so, which two files and versions do I need and where are they ?
Thanks!
- I dont know.
- The link to the files are posted above (somewhere) in this thread…
I havn´t tried myself yet, (i´m on openhab 2.5M2). But I get the picture (understand the concept).
First of all, you need to understand what this “hack” is all about. It´s an alternative habpanel (modified original = “hack”). So you´ll have to uninstall the original one first, and then replace it with this new one.
When replacing, you´ll need to add the two files into your addons folder.
After that you need to set the “tag” to the items you want to filter. No tagging, there will be no items going through the filter. And therefore no items availble in habpanel.
Thats basicly it. (as far as I understand).
Notice - You may have to clear cache/tmp and restart openhab for it to work.
If it still doesnt work. You just make the changes back in opposite direction. Remove the two files, install original habpanel again. And you should be back to where you started.
This is suppose to be a simple “hack”. So I guess it should work with openhab 2.4.
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