Monitoring repearter telemetry - how often is too much?

[dreimal8]

Hi,
i found out that of the total traffic i received, about 50% is accounted for by requests and reply.
Most of these requests probably run automatically because they happen at even intervals.
A lot of these requests come from people who use Home Assistant.
The most of the requests are FLOOD - and so a lot of traffic is generated in the mesh.

I don't use Home Assistant myself - so my questions may be stupid, then I ask for an explanation.

My questions are:

Is there a way to do requests for monitoring repeaters only using a given path to reduce the traffic in the mesh?
Is there a way to prevent users from polling their repeaters every 30 minutes?

Requesting telemetry only with a given path and only every 6 hours (as example) would reduce the traffic a lot!

[towerviewcams]

Yes you can add a direct path to each repeater and disable path reset.

[dreimal8]

Yes you can add a direct path to each repeater and disable path reset.

But this does not seem to be the default setting and therefore it is probably ignored by many users.

[towerviewcams]

All you need to do is program the companion with a direct path, then, set the path reset disable and your done. default it will flood to find an available path. One of the biggest issues now is that if you have more then say 2 or 3 repeaters that you collect data from the system will burst so many transmit messages that the system gets flooded and replies dont even have a chance to come back until it calms down.

[dreimal8]

True, but it doesn't solve the problem, because it's not enough, if I know that, but 99% of all meshcore Home Assistant users leave it in the default state.
The unnecessary FLOOD requests that are sent every 10 minutes by some people only become less when Home Assistant requests are not sent at all without a path being saved, and it is prevented from the default setting that requests can be sent every 10 minutes.

And exactly that is my question - what in Home Assistant integration for meshcore must be changed to prevent sending Requests without a path and and unnecessarily often.

If this only can be reached by going into the settings and changing something, it will end up in running after every Home Assistant user, telling him what to do.
The settings should prevent this by default.

[towerviewcams]

default flood requests for repeater stations is 7200 (2 hours). What is the 10 min you speak of?

[dreimal8]

The worst example i found in the mesh by just collecting all received packets in a database. There are people around usung such settings as long as it is possible.

[halo779]

This seems to be more of a user issue than a plugin issue, the defaults set in meshcore-ha are quite conservative.

I do agree that the UI could be enhanced to improve the process of setting a direct path, but ultimately if the concern is users sending requests every 10 mins is something your best up taking up with the specific users.

meshcore-ha has a built in token bucket on it's requests, so the plugin itself is already attempting to handle any issues of runaway requests.

[dreimal8]

I am just trying to reduce requests.
These are all sent FLOOD.

[towerviewcams]

I had such a hard time with getting repeater telemetry. spent days on this. Went remote term and a python script and then export CSV to HA to display nicely. Wish this method worked relaibly for those who own more then 5+ ish repeaters. Maybe things will improve.

Timers are needed.

delay to next repeater station pole
set path route (now you can do this in the companion direclty and then turn off path reset but this has its own issues)

dev will come along im sure and hope to revisit

[awolden]

Path management is largely deferred to node firmware with some functions to update the contact path. Flood requests should only happen if HA client can’t reach the destination repeater 3-5 times in a row which point path gets cleared and request becomes flood

[rikkertkoppes]

We currently see a lot of these requests in the Netherlands from a few people that have set the interval to the allowed minimum (300s, 5 minutes). Which is an absurdly low minimum.

Can at least raise the minimum interval (with priotrity)?

[dreimal8]

This is how it looks if we had weather caused long distance connections:

Over 2400 flood requests in 24h.
So the problem seems not to be local - it seems to be anywhere if the number of these requests increase to the double if we recieve messages from a few 100km away.

[IoTThinks]

I think we need to have some packet throttling based on the channel ultilization.
We can not define how often is too much.