Domoticz dies after a couple of days.

[Woody1]

Hi,

I'm running Domoticz on a Raspberry Pi for about 6 years without any hiccup, only shutting it down when upgrading the software, OS, and at one point reinstalling everything when replacing the Pi with a newer model. Other than that Domoticz is rock solid and just running year after year. Up to now, that is. Domoticz in primarily used to monitor my gas and electricity use. The data is retrieved from the P1 port on the smart meter via a USB-Serial converter that plugs into one of the USB ports of the Pi.

But suddenly I find that Domoticz is quits working every couple of days. The symptoms:

- I'm no longer able to connect with the web inteface.
- The Pi itself runs and I can connect to it (ssh). Uptime tells me that the Pi did not lose power (Pi fed by POE)
- A 'sudo service domoticz status' show that domoticz was started a couple of days ago and is running.
- A 'sudo service domoticz restart' brings back Domiticz. The web interface is functioning again, and I get new data in from the P1 port. But I do not have the data from the point where Domoticz stopped up until the restart.

This started some weeks ago, on an older version of Debian, and the previous version of Domoticz, so I thought, well, the SD card is maybe 3 years old and could potentially have developed a problem so let's replace that. I installed Debian Trixie lite and the latest version of Domoticz (2025.2) on a fresh SD card, restored my latest backup and was up and running again in no time. This process is quite simple these days

To my surprise however the initial problem is still there. The Pi keeps running, but Domoticz dies in a couple of days (1-4). I am about to order a new Pi and see if that solves the problem, but before I do that I would like to know if there is anything else I can take a look at?

Any suggestion is welcome.

Regards,


Paul

[jannl]

Do you happen to use Philips Hue? There is an issue which seems to crash Domoticz in rare cases.

It is already fixed and merged, one of the latest builds should contain the fix, see the forum and/or github.

[Woody1]

Although I hardly ever use Hue via Domoticz it is installed in my setup. So that might be the problem. I'll take a look at the fix, thanks for the heads-up!

[waltervl]

Check the Domoticz log file and perhaps crash file. See also the troubleshooting wiki: https://wiki.domoticz.com/Troubleshooting
Also bad power can screw up thing and uptime is still normal.
Does it stop at a specific time? Do you have backup enabled and does it stop around midnight or on a round hour?

[Woody1]

Last night Domoticz quit around 05:10 (the data point @05:10 is the last one containing data, the next one is 11:20, after restarting). The time before tonight's event was a couple of days ago, around 02:00, and the times before that I do not know.

There is a crash file (which its existence I did not know about until you mentioned it) that has a time stamp of 05;13 today, so that seems to fit the loss of records nicely. I then read the Troubleshooting Wiki you suggested. Also new to me, thanks for pointing me to it.

Looking at the crash file I learned that the signal_handler() occurred in thread9, which happens to busy itself with the "Philips Hue". So I think that @janni hit the nail on the head so to speak.

I'll look into the fix.

Does anyone know if this Hue problem only affected the latest version of Domoticz? In that case I have two different problems on my hands, as the problem occurred first in my older installation.

Anyway, thanks for the great help!

[jannl]

The crash is mainly related to the latest firmware update of the Hue bridge.

[Woody1]

Yeah, I see. I set the software distribution channel to 'Bèta' but how do I force an update?

[Woody1]

Scratch that, there is a button for it

Anyways, I upgraded to build 16954; let's see what happens.

Thanks again for the support!

Regards,


Paul