South Africa C4 user Posted April 3, 2023 Share Posted April 3, 2023 The controller (CA10 on latest OS) at my Beach house has been becoming marginally non-responsive (unable to log in on Composer HE over a VPN - more accurately, will only log in on 1 in 4 or 5 attempts) every couple of weeks. C4 app log in is fine and as I am not at the house when this happens, I cannot comment on anything else. This has been fixed by a rack reboot each time. The second and third time I experienced the problem, my dealer had a look with Composer Pro and we are seeing the CPU usage up between 50% and 60% (it usually runs between 2% and 10%). We looked in more detail this evening and one process (c4metricsd) is running at 50% (I am guessing that it is using 2 CPU cores flat out). My dealer has a query in with Control4. In the meantime, I was wondering if anyone has any idea what could be causing this. My guess is a driver update but I am not aware of any drivers that would have (auto updated) at my Beach house and not my main residence so it feels more like something going corrupt? Any help / suggestions would be greatly appreciated! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Andrew luecke Posted April 3, 2023 Share Posted April 3, 2023 We'd need to know what drivers you're using. But most likely driver (if you have any of our drivers, run display diagnostics, as I think we at least warn of some). I'm not aware of any performance issues with any chowmain drivers at the moment either (provided they're up to date). In fact, on some, I went overboard with improving performance Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alanchow Posted April 3, 2023 Share Posted April 3, 2023 Control4 support has the ability to narrow down potential issues. They'll provide a report which will detail what potential problems there are. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Amr Posted April 3, 2023 Share Posted April 3, 2023 Will good luck to get them respond to your dealer, this could take weeks to get any response! I hope I’m mistaken … Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alanchow Posted April 4, 2023 Share Posted April 4, 2023 51 minutes ago, Amr said: Will good luck to get them respond to your dealer, this could take weeks to get any response! I hope I’m mistaken … If you have trouble contacting your dealer Control4 does have a customer satisfaction team dedicated to providing prompt resolutions and assistance. https://www.control4.com/company/contact-us/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alanchow Posted April 4, 2023 Share Posted April 4, 2023 Just realised i misread that. Control4 (SnapOne) have multiple service desks around the world. If one service desk closes for the day a technical support agent from another service desk can continue on with the ticket. Major Service Desks include United States, United Kingdom and Australia. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cyknight Posted April 4, 2023 Share Posted April 4, 2023 4 hours ago, Amr said: Will good luck to get them respond to your dealer, this could take weeks to get any response! I hope I’m mistaken … Huh. I get them on the phone right away.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
South Africa C4 user Posted April 4, 2023 Author Share Posted April 4, 2023 Thanks everyone! We’ll definitely run the display diagnostics on one if the Chowmain drivers annd see if that provides an hint and hopefully my dealer gets some feedback from C4 today! I have no doubt he will. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Andrew luecke Posted April 4, 2023 Share Posted April 4, 2023 18 minutes ago, South Africa C4 user said: Thanks everyone! We’ll definitely run the display diagnostics on one if the Chowmain drivers annd see if that provides an hint and hopefully my dealer gets some feedback from C4 today! I have no doubt he will. That only does a basic check (we have more advanced diagnostics built in, but its best to contact Control4, as we can basically only detect there is a problem even if the CPU is low, whereas theirs can determine what the problem is which is what you need). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Amr Posted April 4, 2023 Share Posted April 4, 2023 1 hour ago, South Africa C4 user said: Thanks everyone! We’ll definitely run the display diagnostics on one if the Chowmain drivers annd see if that provides an hint and hopefully my dealer gets some feedback from C4 today! I have no doubt he will. Pls share the findings when u nail it! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Andrew luecke Posted April 4, 2023 Share Posted April 4, 2023 It could even be programming tbh Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
South Africa C4 user Posted April 4, 2023 Author Share Posted April 4, 2023 11 hours ago, Andrew luecke said: We'd need to know what drivers you're using. But most likely driver (if you have any of our drivers, run display diagnostics, as I think we at least warn of some). I'm not aware of any performance issues with any chowmain drivers at the moment either (provided they're up to date). In fact, on some, I went overboard with improving performance Thanks again for this tip. I have a few Chowmain drivers (the Experience Button Suite, the eGauge driver and some others - didn’t get as far as checking others). Interestingly one of the Experience Button Suite drivers (Yes/no) did not have the Display Diagnostics option. We found no issues on the Experience Button Suite. We did find an error on the eGauge driver. @Andrew luecke - I can message you the detail if you want this but essentially it looked like a divide by 0 error to me. My dealer has deleted the driver as I actually don’t use it any more. There used to be some limitations to the driver (which I believe have been fixed in the last couple of years) and as a consequence, I moved to using Modbus to read from my eGauge. As a consequence, my dealer deleted the driver (after double checking that I really am not using it! I hope he is right!). This didn’t help the CPU usage so we did a reboot and will monitor… Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alanchow Posted April 4, 2023 Share Posted April 4, 2023 1 hour ago, South Africa C4 user said: Thanks again for this tip. I have a few Chowmain drivers (the Experience Button Suite, the eGauge driver and some others - didn’t get as far as checking others). Interestingly one of the Experience Button Suite drivers (Yes/no) did not have the Display Diagnostics option. We found no issues on the Experience Button Suite. We did find an error on the eGauge driver. @Andrew luecke - I can message you the detail if you want this but essentially it looked like a divide by 0 error to me. My dealer has deleted the driver as I actually don’t use it any more. There used to be some limitations to the driver (which I believe have been fixed in the last couple of years) and as a consequence, I moved to using Modbus to read from my eGauge. As a consequence, my dealer deleted the driver (after double checking that I really am not using it! I hope he is right!). This didn’t help the CPU usage so we did a reboot and will monitor… It could be anything in your system and the best person to diagnose is a Control4 support engineer. They will pinpoint the issue for you rather than guessing as there are diagnostic tools they use in-house to pinpoint performance issues. We work closely with them and usually if they find something they notify us As such the drivers we write are usually pretty solid. We go the extra mile by adding our own diagnostics in along with other features to ensure the quality of the drivers we create are of the highest quality. South Africa C4 user and Andrew luecke 1 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Neo1738 Posted April 12, 2023 Share Posted April 12, 2023 Any updates on this? In case happens to someone else. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
South Africa C4 user Posted April 13, 2023 Author Share Posted April 13, 2023 2 hours ago, Neo1738 said: Any updates on this? In case happens to someone else. I am 8 days in with no further problems. I would like to wait another week or two before declaring things fixed! My suspicion is that I had managed to corrupt the eGauge driver (which was displaying some sort of error). The problem wasn’t the driver itself as it had worked fine for years and had not been updated recently (AFAIK) nor was it programming against the driver as I had removed all such programming a wrong time ago and my dealer confirmed there was no programming before deleting the driver. So I am assuming that the driver became corrupt somehow or it did not like the fact that I was connecting to the eGauge via this driver AND via a generic Modbus driver (although even that has been the case for a few years). Two interesting observations (that I did not make previously) are: 1. I updated the eGauge firmware to the latest firmware at about the same time as the problem started (may well be coincidence) and while I say “about”, this could also have been a couple of weeks out so is not a definitive link. This is not something I thought about until now! 2. Apart from the error when we ran diagnostics, we also noted that the driver was seeing the eGauge as being offline despite the correct IP address having been entered and the eGauge being very much online. I was very fortunate in that I no longer needed this driver having moved all of my programming to other sources (a Modbus driver and a Victron driver) a couple of years ago. I had even stopped using this driver to pull up the eGauge UI and was using a generic webview driver for this, so in part this was simply bad maintenance of my project and my dealer (and I - I am definitely not blaming my dealer, but the dealer is the only one who can delete drivers) should have deleted this driver a couple of years back. Neo1738 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Andrew luecke Posted April 13, 2023 Share Posted April 13, 2023 5 hours ago, South Africa C4 user said: I am 8 days in with no further problems. I would like to wait another week or two before declaring things fixed! My suspicion is that I had managed to corrupt the eGauge driver (which was displaying some sort of error). The problem wasn’t the driver itself as it had worked fine for years and had not been updated recently (AFAIK) nor was it programming against the driver as I had removed all such programming a wrong time ago and my dealer confirmed there was no programming before deleting the driver. So I am assuming that the driver became corrupt somehow or it did not like the fact that I was connecting to the eGauge via this driver AND via a generic Modbus driver (although even that has been the case for a few years). Two interesting observations (that I did not make previously) are: 1. I updated the eGauge firmware to the latest firmware at about the same time as the problem started (may well be coincidence) and while I say “about”, this could also have been a couple of weeks out so is not a definitive link. This is not something I thought about until now! 2. Apart from the error when we ran diagnostics, we also noted that the driver was seeing the eGauge as being offline despite the correct IP address having been entered and the eGauge being very much online. I was very fortunate in that I no longer needed this driver having moved all of my programming to other sources (a Modbus driver and a Victron driver) a couple of years ago. I had even stopped using this driver to pull up the eGauge UI and was using a generic webview driver for this, so in part this was simply bad maintenance of my project and my dealer (and I - I am definitely not blaming my dealer, but the dealer is the only one who can delete drivers) should have deleted this driver a couple of years back. To be honest, I don't think we've come across anyone else reporting similar issues with eGauge.. It is likely coincidence, or caused by something else ( as I suspect Control4 would have notified us by now, or at the very least, we would have pushed a forced update). Any idea what the error was? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
South Africa C4 user Posted April 13, 2023 Author Share Posted April 13, 2023 11 hours ago, Andrew luecke said: To be honest, I don't think we've come across anyone else reporting similar issues with eGauge.. It is likely coincidence, or caused by something else ( as I suspect Control4 would have notified us by now, or at the very least, we would have pushed a forced update). Any idea what the error was? Hi Andrew, I took a photo of the screen with the Lua output at the time. See below. May well all be pure coincidence and I am not declaring the issue resolved until I get another week or two of complete stability. We should probably have submitted diagnostics instead of / before deleting the driver Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Andrew luecke Posted April 13, 2023 Share Posted April 13, 2023 Gday, that's probably not a huge issue.. We did release a fairly big update recently which I recall fixes a lua error but it wouldn't cause performance issue. Our diagnostics are designed to treat all errors as equally serious. In all likelihood, this is likely just happening during the polling and has no impact on the system South Africa C4 user 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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