Why just not install all bindings?

Add-ons Bindings
1

Hey guys (and girls).
I got a maybe very newbie question …
When i got some smart devices from china, means it’s just an unlabeled “smart” plug, and i don’t know which protocol or which “language” it talks, i was trying to find it out without success.
TRhen i thought about installing one binding, try it out and uninstall it again …
But finally i thought … why just don’t install all available bindings and let the openhabianpi run with then all acivated? Also i am sure, there must be a reason why they are not installed all by default, as there will be any disadvantage, or maybe not?
We would be glad to have your explanation.

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Even if you install all the bindings you still need to know what device it is to configure the binding. Installing all bindings are fine but you’re basically adding unnecessary stuff to ur install. It would be like buying a gadget with all the bells and whistles you’re not going to use

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3

There are some very real downsides to installing all the bindings.

  • There are something like 300 of them and the average users only uses 10 or so. That is a whole lot of work OH has to do loading from disk and enabling 290 bindings that will never be used. You can expect your OH start times to grow to dozens of minutes or more before it is ready to start loading your configs and processing events.

  • Each enabled binding takes up a not-insignificant amount of RAM. Loading them all can take the requirement of around 500 MB of RAM to run OH north of 2 GB of RAM and would make it impossible to run on a RPi.

  • There are 1.x and 2.x versions of many bindings. You cannot successfully run with both versions of that binding installed at the same time in some cases.

  • There may be other bindings that are not compatible with each other. I’ve not seen a report of that on this forum before but I’ve not seen anyone try to install and enable ALL the bindings either.

  • From a security stand point, the more software a server is running the bigger the attack surface. Running 290 bindings which are not doing anything is a huge expansion of your attack surface for no benefit.

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4

another downside - you’d also hammer the OH server with all the auto-discovery bindings as well

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