Legacy Server loads

[Morrus]

Whenever I use vBMail it takes about 8 hours to run through and email everyone.

My server times out every few minutes using the mod. That can be fixed by simply hitting refresh so that it tries that page again and continues where it left off. The problem is, I have to sit there for the full 8 hours hitting refresh every few minutes. That's no fun.

Is there a way to:

1) Reduce the server load by perhaps lowering the number of emails it sends at once or slowing them down or something?

2) Do it in the background so the browser window doesn't have to be left on.

I checked the settings, and saw nothing there, and I'm afraid to mess with vBulletin's default email settings.

 

[Fillip H.]

1) vBulletin Options -> Email Options:
Use Mailqueue System: Yes
Use Cron Based Sending: Yes
Number of Emails to Send Per Batch: Reduce this number of the above two settings are already Yes

2) That's not currently possible, as it would murder performance. If you enable cron based sending, the act of queuing the emails is very quick.

 

[Morrus]

Sorry about the delay in replying - I had to wait until I had another email to send, which was today.

So I tried the above settings. It whipped through the sending screens in about 30 minutes, instead of 8 hours, and didn't time out at all. That's the good news!

I'm user #1, and I got my email about 15 minutes after I sent it. All good.

However, I have no way of knowing that anybody else did, or how long it's taking to send them, or where it is in the queue. Is there any way to verify this information?

Generally I have a couple of hundred unsubscriptions every time I send a mail. So I know folks are getting them. This time, so far (and I sent it about 3 hours ago) I haven't had a single one. So they're either not going out, or they're going out incredibly slowly, or this particular email was so attractive that not one person out of 160,000 unsubscribed.

If I'd thought about it, I'd have some accounts at various points through the user base so I could monitor when those accounts received the email. Too late for that now though!

It's set at 20 emails per batch with no delay between emails. 160,000 users divided by 20 is 8,000 batches. But the info not shown in the adminCP is how far apart those batches are. Is is a batch a second, a minute, an hour? Because that would make it all take 2 hours, 6 days, or 1 year depending on what that value is.

 

[Morrus]

Ah, it's a scheduled task set at every 10 minutes. Which means it's going to take 20 hours to send all my emails out, if I'm understanding this correctly? Is that how it works?

If I change that scheduled task now, will it speed up immediately, or will it only do so next time I send something? And what would be a safe minimum space? A batch a minute?

 

[Fillip H.]

Ah, it's a scheduled task set at every 10 minutes. Which means it's going to take 20 hours to send all my emails out, if I'm understanding this correctly? Is that how it works?

If I change that scheduled task now, will it speed up immediately, or will it only do so next time I send something? And what would be a safe minimum space? A batch a minute?

It would run through 1 batch per scheduled task run, yeah. It will be retroactive, so it will apply to existing outstanding batches.

You are also able to manually run the scheduled task in the AdminCP to speed up the process.

 

[Fillip H.]

Hello Morrus,

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