Sitecore takes longtime to publish items

Question

In the Sitecore content tree there are like 600,000 items. But there are only 10,000 items which are publishable. It takes hours and hours to publish the content, infinite time I would say.

But when there are like only 20,000 items, it publishes the tree in 5mins.

Seems like Sitecore is going through all items whether they will be published or not. Is there a way to get rid of this to improve performance?

Answer 1

Try using incremental publish rather than a full publish. See the Content Reference PDF for more info on publishing http://sdn.sitecore.net/upload/sitecore6/contentreference-usletter.pdf

Answer 2

Select "Publish Item" with the root node selected in the content editor rather than selecting "Publish Site." This will allow you to select smart publish, which should look to see if an item needs to be published or not before actually publishing it.

Answer 3

I have written a custom publishing tool to achieve this task. Since I am using Lucene indexing, using the index I select items in final workflow state (all items have a workflow) and publish them.

Now it's just a matter of publishing 10,000 items :).