Sitecore publishing taking too long

Question

A smart publish of an item (without publishing its subitems), takes around 1 minute to publish. Even when they are no changes to be published really. And this issue is not restricted to a particular item or a set of items - this is across the site.

Log file snippet:

11412 11:54:29 INFO  AUDIT (sitecore\admin): Publish item: master:/sitecore/content/Home/error/404, language: en, version: 1, id: {872E1F05-CCF7-48F5-97EA-65A48FE93DAA}
15368 11:54:34 INFO  AUDIT (sitecore\admin): Publish, languages:en, targets:Internet, databases:web, incremental:false, smart:true, republish:false, children:false
ManagedPoolThread #96 11:54:34 INFO  Job started: Publish
ManagedPoolThread #4 11:54:34 INFO  Job started: Publish to 'web'
ManagedPoolThread #4 11:54:34 INFO  HtmlCacheClearer clearing HTML caches for all sites (1).
ManagedPoolThread #4 11:54:34 INFO  HtmlCacheClearer done.
ManagedPoolThread #4 11:55:32 INFO  Job ended: Publish to 'web' (units processed: 2)
ManagedPoolThread #96 11:55:32 INFO  Job ended: Publish (units processed: )

I had added a new setting <setting name="MaxWorkerThreads" value="100"/> hoping that would speed it up, but no luck. All the settings/event queue are the Sitecore default ones. Looks like the process gets stuck in between.

Any tips or ideas of how I can debug or fix this?

Sitecore version - 6.5

EDIT

There is no firewall between web and master databases. Languages supported is only one - English. This is an existing solution and I didn't make any changes to it. All other events except publishing work as expected - no delays.

Cheers.

have you implemented any custom publish hooks? If so I would start by disabling them to rule out that they are the culprit. — Christian Hagelid
What kind of servers are you using? If you are using Virtualized server then are your web and database servers in the same dataceneter? If you're using physical servers, is there is firewall in between? Do the specs of your servers meet he minimum required? — jammykam
It's worth testing your database performance with this simple script to rule out any connection issues. — jammykam

dmead dmead · Accepted Answer · 2015-08-05T22:04:44

For me what has caused this problem in the past is a custom handler for the item:saved event (you could look for a custom item:saving handler as well). Since the publish will Save items to the Web database, the custom item:saved handler will be called. Do you have one of those, and if so can you debug it during publish time to see if it is doing something unexpected that could cause the problem?

Sitecore publishing taking too long

2 Answers