Sitecore ECM Slow to Process/Dispatch

1
votes

I have a client who is using the ECM and just dispatched an email blast to approximately 18,000 users. The dispatch is taking quite a while (about 2 hours to process not even half of the users).

Has anyone encountered this issue?

Can the ECM not handle such large lists?

2
sitecoresitecore-ecm
I know of customers using ECM that blasts millions of emails using ECM and this is done in under one hour. - Zooking
I would start by checking the logs and analyze the traffic between the Sitecore instance and the MTA. Further on there is a lot of configuration settings for optizing the performance of ECM. - Zooking
Are you doing a lot of personalization? For customers with large analytics DBs and little server power this can cause ECM to be very slow. - IvanL

2 Answers

3
votes

As mentioned elsewhere, ECM can handle that load just fine. In general, throughput on ECM is limited by:

  • Fragmented indices on the "analytics" database (or just limited capacity on same)
  • Bandwidth limitations. If each mail is 500KB (lots of images), sending 10 mails per second requires 5Mbit bandwidth
  • CPU on the server in question

From what you've shared so far, I cannot guess as to which of the above is limiting the throughput on your installation. My personal guess would be capacity and speed of the database.

More information here: http://sdn.sitecore.net/upload/sdn5/products/ecm/200/ecm_tuning_guide_20-a4.pdf

3
votes

I had a similar issue with a client where it was taking hours to send emails. Check the NumberThreads setting in the Sitecore.EmailCampaign.config file. The default is quite low at "1" and most servers should be able to handle more threads.

Definitely follow the tuning guide that Mark posted. The Performance Measurement Tool can help you get the ideal number of sending threads so that you're not over or under utilizing your server.