Best practices for on-line marketing performance

Running the Kentico Xperience Enterprise on-line marketing functionality typically increases the performance requirements for websites with very heavy traffic. This page provides best practices for optimizing the performance of such websites.

When trying to scale your application, the following recommendations generally apply:

• To increase the supported traffic load (requests per second, new contacts per second, concurrent visitors), deploy additional instances of your MVC live site application (as web farm servers).
• To increase the supported volume of on-line marketing data, increase the size and performance of the database server.

Performance best practices

To achieve optimal performance with Xperience Enterprise websites, follow the recommendations in the sections below.

• Optimize your web farm environment
• Separate the on-line marketing database
• Set up the SQL server
• Optimize database indexes
• Optimize send out of marketing emails
• Set up automatic deleting of contacts
• Disable event logging for automation and marketing emails
• Optimize scoring and contact group recalculation

Optimize your web farm environment

The Xperience MVC development model already uses web farms for synchronization of cached content and of most files. To handle high traffic loads, you may need to increase the number of servers in the web farm. To see how to properly set up the web farm synchronization, see Configuring web farm servers.

The API does not ensure recalculation of contact scores, contact groups, personas and marketing automation triggers when logging activities from the live site application. For performance reasons, these recalculations are performed by the Xperience application.

By default, the system batch processes activities and contact detail updates every 10 seconds. You can configure the processing interval separately for the Xperience and live site application. Adding the below key to the live site application affects the interval at which logged activities and contact detail updates are saved from the memory into the database. Adding the below key to the Xperience application affects how often Xperience recalculates the data that could be affected by activities and contact updates.

If your system processes a large number of activities and contact updates, you may need to increase the default interval.

1. Open your project’s web.config file.

2. Add the following key into the appSettings section of the file. Increase the value to reflect how often you want the activities and contact updates to be processed.

   Processing activities and contact updates every 30 seconds

   Copy

   
   
   
    <add key="CMSProcessContactActionsInterval" value="30" />
   
   
    

3. Save the file.

The system now processes activities and contact detail updates in accordance with the configured intervals.

Separate the on-line marketing database

Running the on-line marketing features on a high-traffic website places a significant load on the database server. To distribute the load of Xperience’s standard and on-line marketing functionality, separate your on-line marketing database to a second database server.

Set up the SQL server

If you have the option to administer the website’s database server, we recommend that you perform the following steps:

• Optimize the database’s Log and Data files:

  • Set a large initial size for the data file and disable Autogrowth
  • Store the log and data files on different drives
  • Store the SQL server error log files on the same drive as the main data file
  • Store the server’s tempdb database to the same drive as the main data file

• Enable the Lock Pages in Memory Option on the database server

Optimize database indexes

By default, the Xperience database tables have indexes optimized for the most common scenarios. However, each website uses a different set of on-line marketing features, with different visitor behavior, and a unique distribution of data.

For optimal performance, we recommend that you regularly use a tool (for example the Database Engine Tuning Advisor) to analyze your database performance. Consider the suggestions and implement any database index adjustments that are suitable for your specific project.

Additionally, the default database indexes are optimized for live site performance, not for operations in the Xperience administration interface. With extremely large volumes of data (millions of records), you may encounter slow performance or timeouts in object lists – for example, if you change the default list ordering or when filtering according to certain fields. You can address these problems by creating custom database indexes with the corresponding columns (note that this may have a negative impact on live site performance).

Optimize send out of marketing emails

Optimize the number of macros in emails

Composing marketing emails for a large number of recipients can decrease the system’s performance, particularly if the emails contain macros and use other email marketing features. Approximately 5% of the email generation time is spent on Tracking clicked links, Tracking opened emails, and Logging on-line marketing activities, when these features are enabled. The time spent on resolving macros grows linearly with the number of macros used in the emails, however, this takes up only a small portion of the total email generation time. Note that the growth of the macro resolving time is linear only if all data is cached and no database operations are performed within the macros.

As a result, we recommend minimizing the number of macros in the content of your marketing emails to ensure a shorter email generation time.

Disable CSS inlining

Inlining of the CSS markup included in marketing email templates can have a negative influence on the performance of your system when composing emails. We recommend disabling CSS inlining to reduce the email generation time.

Enable the email queue

When generating a large amount of emails, we recommend configuring the system to use the email queue and setting the Network delivery method for your SMTP server. When using the Network delivery method with the email queue enabled, the system temporarily stores all outgoing emails in the database instead of sending them directly to the SMTP server.

Set up automatic deleting of contacts

The contact management features create contacts and log activities for every visitor, which generates a very large amount of data on high‑traffic websites. Extremely large numbers of stored contacts and activities may slow down certain operations in the system and be overwhelming for your marketers.

To reduce the volume of data, we recommend that you configure the system to regularly delete contacts that meet certain conditions and are no longer relevant.

Disable event logging for automation and marketing emails

To reduce system overhead on Xperience instances with a very large number of contacts, we recommend that you disable event logging for the following actions:

• Transitions between steps of automation processes
• Sending of marketing emails (within email feeds)

Add the following keys to the appSettings section of the web.config file:

<add key="CMSLogMATransitions" value="false" />
<add key="CMSLogNewsletterIssueEvents" value="false" />

Optimize scoring and contact group recalculation

Recalculation of contact scores, contact groups, and marketing automation triggers can be a resource-intensive process that may reduce website performance.

• When scheduling score recalculations and contact group rebuilds, avoid your website’s peak traffic hours.
• If you use custom macro rules in your scoring rules, contact group conditions, or time-based marketing automation triggers, implement translators to significantly improve recalculation performance.