Posted by tvdijck on March 19, 2014 at 1:01pm
Does anyone have any experience with Queue Mails to handle higher loads on registration?
We are running a site that has high peaks of logins and registrations (due to call to actions on television).
Logins and registration happen on both API's and the site itself and for each registration and lost password a mail is send.
Would we benefit from offloading the mails to a queue or will the benefit be marginal?
Comments
Some benefit, but may not be enough
I wrote the Queue Mail module ...
The idea is that it avoid a PHP process being tied up until an email is processed, specially when you have many mails to be sent from a single page (e.g. emailing users who commented on a post that a new comment was posted, a newsletter, ...etc.).
If you have many PHP processes tied up waiting on network events, then you can quickly see a high way pile up scenario and the server will suffer.
So, you avoid the above things if you use Queue Mail.
But, if you have logs of registrations because of a TV ad, there are other issues that may occur, From experience with large and high traffic sites, there is no caching that can be done for this, since a user signing up has to load all the site's module and execute all the PHP baggage along with it.
Things that you may do to speed up the registration process and reduce the server load include simplifying the /user/register page, for example keeping the blocks shown on that page to a minimum, caching all the blocks that remain, reducing the number of enabled modules, and general streamlining of the site for logged in users.
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Queues are your friend
I've used mail queues for Drupal with high volume email sites and they are invaluable. This applies to any external service really because in the event that the server you are calling goes down you will suffer timeouts and process hangups until it's back online.
I haven't used Queue Mail module specifically but since it is using the Drupal Queue API it should be great.