General speed issues

[tastrax]

Just a quick question hopefully.

We have recently been using CiviCRM after coming from a custom CMS that was over 10 years old. We have around 20,000 contacts/members, regularly send emails to 50 - 100 people and quarterly to 3000. We are experiencing really slow connections to smart groups (we have about 120 smart groups) and then really slow connections to emailing those members. Is this the norm? Our old system handled this seamlessly on a shared server but CivCRM seems to be struggling to the point we need to consider ditching it altogether (despite it costing us $1,000's to implement it).

Would it be the norm (with the above member numbers) to take 3 minutes to go to Contacts, Manage groups, find the group by a search, select all the contacts and then use the Action of Email Members?

[Fabian_SYSTOPIA]

Hi Tastrax,

smart groups can be quite demanding for your system. You could see them as saved searches that CiviCRM performs in the background (via a cron job) or "on demand" (e.g. if you want to show contacts in a smart group) in order to keep your groups up to date.

In your case that means CiviCRM has to perform about 120 searches on 20k whenever the cron job runs or if you want to use smart groups and they are not cached.

In order to speed things up, there is a smart group cache - cached groups allow for much faster search results. You can check if the cron job is activated here: yourdomain.com/civicrm/admin/job?reset=1

Two things you could try:

Configure the Cron Job "Rebuild Smart Group Cache" and see if it helps. This can be a bit tricky, as it also depends how cronjobs are configured on your system. I would strongly advise to try out new settings on a non-productive environment.

Try to reduce the number and complexity of smart groups, if possible. Especially try to avoid "nested" smart groups such as "Smart Group A contains all contacts of Smart Group B & C, whereas Smartgroup B contains contacts of Smartgroup D& E...".

Maybe someone could post their experiences on good settings for the cron jobs for a similar scenario?

[tastrax]

Thanks Fabian - I will check out those settings

[Hershel]

CiviCRM is inherently a resource-intensive package and it's recommended to use a host with experience successfully hosting it. You can find a list here:

https://civicrm.org/providers/hosting

Many users have found that switching to such a host helps with performance issues.