Currently using ColdFusion 8 enterprise on 32 bit linux box to send out our mail to a third party provider who do the delivery (relay). Currently we have maintain mail server connections checked in the ColdFusion admin but they'd like us to limit the connections to each one of their servers to 5 and I'm not sure if you can make ColdFusion do that, I'm pretty sure not, at least not officially...
Looking at a max of 4000 / minute being spooled but more likely in the region of 2000 / minute.
Two questions:
Is it possible to "hack" ColdFusion to limit the amount of connections it creates and maintains (in an xml file within lib or SERVER-INF somewhere maybe?)
How much performance loss would you expect from not maintaining the connections?
If anyone has any experience with this it'd be appreciated.
Does "Mail Delivery Threads" on the Mail spool settings not do this?
if the above doesn't give you what you want, then you can always use the javax.mail libraries. Those libraries give you a lot of flexibility and can generally configure it how you want to. Of course, this option works best when your a java developer.
Related
I have 4-7 sharepoint servers. We have a scom alert already implemented to generate alert if the server is down. But we want to implement scom alert if the website is down.
Can we genearate alert using scom by using ping functionality?
My idea is, we ping the server continuosly and when the website is unresponsive for some time we get alert saying that the website is unresposive.
Can this be implemented? And how much effort is needed? And do we need any other services to be implemented?
Any help would be appreciated.
Ravi,
Forgive me for the post being more philosophy and less answer.
For better or worse, Microsoft has resisted implemented a simple ping monitor in SCOM. Their is a solid reason for this. It would be overly leveraged by folks that don't know any better. The result of which would reflect poorly on the quality of SCOM as a monitoring tool. What I mean by that is that a ping monitor is a terrible idea as it doesn't tell the poor soul that was awoken at 2am much of anything beyond the highest level notion that something is wrong.
If you have 5 minutes to sit in front of the SCOM console to create a ping alert then you would serve your support teams much better if you spent those same 5 minutes creating a Web Application Availability monitor. The reason for this is that the Web App Avail monitor will actually look at the response to ensure that it is logical and successful.
Here is the documentation to create a Web Application Availability Monitor. It looks difficult only until your first implementation. It really is a snap. https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh881882(v=sc.12).aspx
Consider that if you had a ping monitor and someone accidentally deleted your index.html file, your ping will happily chug along without telling anyone. Same with a bad code update. Heck, you could even stop your web application server and ping is still going to respond.
Conversely, If you had a Web App Avail monitor pointed at each of the nodes in a load balanced web farm and your load balancer failed, all of your Web monitors will continue to post as healthy while your monitor looking at the load balancer will start to fail. A quick glace at the console will tell your support team that indeed the issue is not with the web servers themselves.
It is a good philosophy to implement your monitors in a way that they testing the target as completely as possible and in the most isolated way possible. You would not want to point a Web App Avail monitor at a load balancer as you would not necessarily know which endpoint did not respond to SCOM to trigger the alert. Some folks go to great lengths to work around this by implementing health check pages that respond with there hostnames. This is usually not necessary, simply create a monitor against each individual node. You are going to want to monitor your load balancer directly so that you know it is up as well.
On another note, there already is a SharePoint management pack (actually one for each version of SharePoint) that you can download from MS for free. This management pack will automatically discovery and monitor all of the components of SharePoint in your infrastructure. It works quite well but if you are new to SCOM then the volume of data and alerts that it creates can be a bit overwhelming at first.
SharePoint 2016 (there is one for each version) management pack: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/wbaer/2015/09/08/system-center-operations-management-pack-for-sharepoint-server-2016-it-preview/
There is also a third party management pack that allows you to simply create ping monitors. People REALLY want this. I respectfully will tell you that that they are doing more harm then good in the majority of implementations that use this. But at the end of the day sometimes you just want something that works and you understand so here it is:
Ping management pack: https://www.opslogix.com/ping-management-pack/
I want to hst a 'send link to my phone feature' on my website. Can someone with server experience suggest to me which company I should go with based on my needs?
More info: I'll be using host gator to host my domain and its pages. I want this text me feature to be on the homepage and it could possibly send millions of links over the coming years (think positive right?) What should I do? I heard this type of feature costs money and I am doing budgeting now.
That depends on what you want to do. If you want an SMS gateway to send links to peoples' mobiles, then Txtlocal is a good option but they charge about 2p a per message I think
Let's say I have a chat app with registration and it does long-polling to an Apache server. I've done some reading but I'm still confused and want to be extremely sure. From my understanding, it can either be :
Any amount of client can do long-polling to that server and it won't affect the limit because all the clients only have 1 concurrent connection each to the server. So if I open the chat app in 7 IE8/chrome/firefox in d same computer OR in different computer EACH and connect to the same url/domain, it won't be affected but if I open the chat in 7 tabs in IE8/chrome/firefox only then it will be affected.
Same as the above but the limit will only be affected if I open 7 IE8/chrome/firefox browsers in 7 computers by 7 different accounts. Which means only 6 different users can connect to the chat app at the same time.
I'm leaning heavily to the first one. Can you help me correct/expand on either both or if both are wrong, kindly add number 3? Thank you!
This limitation is a restriction put in place by each browser vendor. The typical connection limit for a browser instance is set to 6 socket connections to the same domain. These six connections make up the browsers socket pool. This socket pool is managed by the socket pool manager and are used across all browser processes. This is to maximize the efficiency of the TCP connection by reusing established connections, as well as other performance benefits.
According to the HTTP 1.1 specification the maximum number of connections should be limited to 2.
Clients that use persistent connections SHOULD limit the number of
simultaneous connections that they maintain to a given server. A
single-user client SHOULD NOT maintain more than 2 connections with
any server or proxy. These guidelines are intended to improve HTTP
response times and avoid congestion.
However, this spec was approved in June 1999 during the infancy of the internet, and browser vendors like Chrome have since increased this number to six.
Currently these are set to 32 sockets per proxy, 6 sockets per
destination host, and 256 sockets per process (not implemented exactly
correct, but good enough).
With that said, each socket pool is managed by each browser. Depending on the browsers connection limit (a minimum of two). You should be able to open 8 connections by opening two tabs in IE, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. Your max connection is limited by the browser itself. Also keep in mind the server can only handle so many concurrent connections at once. Don't accidentally DoS yourself :)
If you absolutely need to go beyond the connection limitation you could look into domain sharding. Which basically tricks the browser into opening new more connections by providing a different the host name with the request. I wouldn't advise using it though, as the browser has set these limitations to maximize performance and reuse existing connections. Tread lightly.
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?
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
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.
I am currently working on a newsletter application which needs to sent around 20K mails in a single shot. I feel, ColdFusion mail sending capacity will not be suitable for this. I don’t have any metrics with me to prove this.
I searched around in web about this, I found there are lot of complains about this kind of bulk mail sending process using built in CFMAIL. Few of them are,
Java heap size error
IOException while sending message
Mail Spool Lock
Mail Spool Timeout
We are using Adobe ColdFusion 9 standard edition.
Is anyone worked like this requirement? Did you faced any issues? How did you fixed that? Is any other alternative ways are there instead of using regular cfmail tag?
We have a system sending out nearly 500k messages about 2 to 3 times per day. CF does not have a problem with it if you have adequate resources allocated - meaning decent drives and space, adequate heap space, and (especially) a well performing SMTP relay. In our case we set up a dedicated relay server that we could fine tune carefully.
CF Mail has not had significant issues since ColdFusion 7. CF 8 and CF 9 both perform well. There is a level at which I would suggest a different system to be sure - and other requirements might mean an SaaS would serve you better - but from a per performance standpoint 20k messages is fairly small and should not be a problem for an enterprise class server.
I think you may face issue if you are using Standard version, I am not sure but there is some thread limit (I guess it it is 10) for spool for standard version which will delay email. Let's say there are 10 threads for spool and every thread wait for 15 seconds for next run (can be adjust from CFIDE) still it will take around 8.333 hours to send out all emails.
We have been using ColdFusion as a webmail delivery system since version 6. We have mail groups with 20k recipients.
We experienced one issue with it back then, the spooler hung and started retransmitting the same mail over and over again, making recipients receive the mail multiple times.
I think this issue was resolved with version 7.
If I recall well there's a difference between coldfusion standard and enterprise. Enterprise versions has enhanced CFMAIL throughput. At least it used to be in previous versions.