Legacy traffic policy

Deprecated

Legacy is deprecated. Only entries that used it in 2.x keep it. A future release will remove it. After you change an entry to Governed, the UI does not offer Legacy again.

Legacy keeps the budget and the retry timing of 2.x. New entries use Governed. See Mesh Traffic Policy.

At each startup or reload, an entry on Legacy logs this warning:

The Legacy traffic policy is deprecated and will be removed in a future release. Select Governed in Global Settings > Mesh Traffic Policy.

How Legacy differs from Governed

Item	Legacy behavior
Budget	One bucket of 20 credits. It gets 1 credit every 120 seconds (approximately 30 each hour).
Cost	1 credit for each automatic request. A full neighbor scan costs 1 credit.
Service calls, forms and buttons	Not metered
Empty budget	A denied status or telemetry poll counts as a failure, and the node backs off. A denied login also starts a backoff. The integration skips a denied neighbor scan.
Retry spacing	interval / 62 x 2^failures, never more than the poll interval, for all retries
Route reset	After 3 failures, the integration resets the route. The next poll floods. There is no route healing.
Auto-disable	Repeaters only, and status polls only. The log line ends with This will reset on restart. To resume the node, restart Home Assistant or reload the entry.
State across restarts	Not saved. A restart resets the budget, the schedules and the auto-disabled nodes.
Request Rate Limiter sensor	Shows the single bucket. It has no attributes.

Before you change to Governed

Do these steps before the change. You cannot change back to Legacy.

1. Add continue_on_error: true to the automation actions that send messages or mesh commands. Under Governed, service calls use credit. If the lane is empty, the call fails with Mesh traffic <lane> lane is empty; try again in <seconds> seconds.
2. Update the dashboards and alerts that use the Request Rate Limiter sensor. Its state changes from the single bucket to the credits of the direct lane. See Monitor the budget.

Under Governed, auto-disable also covers clients and stays after a restart. A node resumes when you edit it or when the companion hears its next advert.

Add Repeater Station also uses credit under Governed. If the lane is empty, the form shows an error. Wait, then submit again.

Change to Governed

1. Go to Settings > Devices & services > MeshCore > Configure > Global Settings.
2. Set Mesh Traffic Policy to Governed.
3. Select Submit.

The change applies immediately, without a reload.