FAQ: Limits and Guardrails (max # of automations, devices, etc)

It seems like in recent months more and more land mines have been discovered that could kill the automations for somewhat power users.

The most recent is the 250 “behaviors” limit, which @kieranlavin apparently stepped into. See this post

I know of other “rate limits and guardrails” disclosed here

I wonder how many other booby traps are there that we don’t really know about?

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@Brad_ST are routines affected by the 250 limit?

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I was over 300 devices before I realized that there was a 300 device limit where I couldn’t select devices in automations that landed on the 2nd page of devices in the IDE.

Now considering ~300 devices and each custom rule “action” is a behavior which is now set to 250…, I feel like this again:

I guess now is a good time to start moving more of my devices over to Hubitat and re-create my rules there and just use ST to monitor.

I’ll gladly pay ST to drop the limits on my account and allow me to keep all of my custom automations! However, if the writing is on the wall, I’m not going to wait until the bottom falls out. :face_with_symbols_over_mouth:

The below Piston is just one (1) light! How many freaking behaviors are in it?!?!? Everything doesn’t run at once so it’s not that taxing. What’s the point of “Modes” if each Automation counts against you? Hopefully I’m misunderstanding this entire concept.

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Since @jody.albritton has been teasing an upcoming announcement about “local processing,” my guess (purely a guess) is that the announcement will be that more of the automations created with the official “custom automation” feature of the new V3 app will run locally. Not all. And not user-written stuff like smartapps and webcore pistons. Just rules entered through the V3 app in the custom automation section. And that’s why the new hard limit.

Because if this new limit affected webcore pistons there would have been a lot more reports in the forums of the problems that @kieranlavin ran into. It was likely the fact that he was doing lots of complex logic with lots of devices but all in the custom automation feature of the V3 app that triggered the limit that @Brad_ST detailed.

But again, I’m just guessing based on available data. :sunglasses:

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Yeah,

These new restrictions are going to kill developers…

I was working on a new cloud SmartApp/homebridge plugin using the new APIs and It will never work with the new restrictions in place.

For example you can only subscribe to 20 devices per app. (Apparently it’s being raised to 55 in the next couple weeks :roll_eyes: )

The rate-limits are extremely arbitrary and go against everything that made ST what it is today.
They really need to assess this crap quick or i’m done developing for ST. Once groovy is killed I will have no choice but to leave if it doesn’t change.

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webCoRE users have been experiencing issues lately. I for one, have not had any “noticeable” issues…(knock on wood).

Actually, majority of my rules are all about not being obvious. Will have to play with the “New App” and see if I can easily recreate some of my webCoRE Pistons in it to get ahead of the ball. Last 1458 times I’ve tried to use the New App, it was a major fail.

On the other hand, I “kinda” REALLY dislike using Hubitat. :face_with_hand_over_mouth:

Bro, it’s because of people like you that has made ST totally freaking awesome from my perspective!

webCoRE, ActionTiles and EchoSpeaks are by far, the most AMAZING aspects of my setup.

The house talks and responds to actions (EchoSpeaks). Tablets all over the place to interact with (ActionTiles). webCoRE to make it all possible!

I remember how I was so underwhelmed by the vanilla, boring, damn near useless ST Hub without the custom apps. Then I discovered the IDE and this AMAZING forum!

Things could only get better, at least I thought. Now fast forward 4 years and we have this mess to deal with.

I am a poster child for what ST has to offer. People come my house and are absolutely amazed! From there, they are buying ST Hubs and Samsung devices just so they can have just a fraction of what I have going on…

Why kill such a powerful platform? I’m sure that just in my Man Cave I’m eating a big chunk out of the 250 behavior limit! :thinking:

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@Brad_ST or @jody.albritton is it accurate to say the “behaviors” limit is for non-groovy smart apps? So basically scenes, SmartThings Home Monitor and custom automation creator? This would explain why I haven’t reached the limit yet. But as Groovy is deprecated and smart apps are moved to the new APIs and developer environment, I could see myself approaching the limit quickly.

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Or it might explain that this is yet to be enforced, as it appears that it took some staff by surprise.

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Everyone, before we decicde that this is a sign of the end times - The rate limits were set low knowing they would need to be raised. As with other rate limits implemented on our platform, the engineering team picked a number that would cover a majority of users as a baseline with the knowledge that we would need to move it up. In the past when we have started at unlimited and work backwords from there it was even more painful to pull the rate limits back than it would have beeen to raise them.

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hmmmm… more painful for the engineers or for the users? I’m guessing y’all expect our pain tolerance to be pretty high???

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@jody.albritton

Where do we get a count of our “behaviors” so we know how close, or how far over the limit we are?

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Both. In the past when we have allowed unlimited everything, it caused platform issues and then the pain of having to pull back from unlimite with developers. Just go back into the history of when we had things like unlimited polling.

Oh I remember… I’ve been around for a while.

So, about that number…

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@jody.albritton

bump bump bump

I am working interanally to surface all of these numbers, some of them are going to be raised pretty soon but we as an org still need to be completely transparent about what they are and how they will impact you.

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Partially. The limit is only for scenes and custom automations, not SHM or Routine as Jason asked. As Jody has mentioned, work to adjust these is in-flight and was prior to this concern surfacing in the community.

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I tried to edit an existing Automation today and received a message when saving - Network Error Couldn’t add automation (cancel/retry buttons). Is this a result of the 250 behaviors limit?

Probably not.

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Any idea what could cause it? I’m not going to delete it to see if it will recreate. Wouldn’t want to find out that way I hit the limit. I have 95 devices and probably close to 100 Automations in the new app - so I am near the edge.