This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz
by Matt Parrish.
Original Post: ActiveMailer email performance on site5
Feed Title: pearware blog - agile web development
Feed URL: http://blog.pearware.org/feed/atom.xml
Feed Description: Agile web development using Ruby on Rails (and sometimes Java)
The site I am working on, RealIdaho.com, is hosted by site5. There are some forms that, when filled out by the user, send confirmation emails to the user, to us internally, and to the realtor’s cellphone. We started getting some reports that the confirmation page wouldn’t come up, and users were resubmitting the form many times. I discovered a few things while investigating that may be useful to others.
The first thing I noticed, is that the page would timeout after 15 seconds and just return a blank page. Not very friendly, and definitely explains why the users were unsure that the form was submitted properly. The site however continued to process the request, and eventually got all the emails out. I contacted the site5 support team and asked the 1) why is the page timing out after only 15 seconds, and 2) why was sending email so slow.
Here’s the answer I got for item 1:
Changing the timeout would affect the global settings for apache. This results in a significant increase in the number of open connections that apache has and degrades server performance. I can ask about this but I don’t think it will be possible to increase the timeout.
While I understand their reasoning, 15 seconds seems awfully short. I believe the default for apache is 5 minutes. Hopefully, they’ll consider increasing that amount at least to 30-60 seconds. While I never want a page that takes more than 5 seconds, I’m sure we’ll have some pages that do take longer, especially ones that need to communicate with external systems.
Regarding number 2, the support technician suggested using sendmail directly instead of sending email over SMTP, as that should be much faster. So, I went into RAILS_ROOT/config/environments/production.rb and added the following line:
ActiveMailer::Base.delivery_method = :sendmail
Here are the performance numbers:
Previous method (SMTP):
Sending Mail to user (25.22760)
Sending Mail to internal (31.11207)
Sending Mail notification (20.70688)
Current method (Sendmail):
Sending Mail to user (0.16841)
Sending Mail to internal (0.28479)
Sending Mail notification (0.24701)
Wow, that’s quite a difference! When I tested the form submission, the confirmation page appeared almost immediately. Now that’s more like it. Now I just need to see about increasing the timeout.
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