EXM comes Out Of the box with Sitecore 9+. That’s great, but how many emails can it send? How do you scale it to meet business requirements? These are questions that need to be answered well ahead of rolling out your new email marketing campaigns as there may be some architectural or infrastructure changes required.
Tag: EXM
EXM on Sitecore 9.0.x
Sitecore 9+ ships with EXM, a powerful Email Marketing tool that can put XDB data to work.
EXM scheduling of A/B Test in non-UTC timezone
A/B Testing in EXM is a great way to learn from and optimise email campaigns to improve engagement results. However I came across an an edge case that had some unintended consequences (at least in Sitecore 9.0 Update 1, perhaps in later releases?).
List Manager and EXM contact search not returning contacts
While testing EXM on a Sitecore 9.0.1 instance we noticed some strange happenings when attempting to view previews for a specific recipient. While the lists were being populated ok, it was not searchable by email. This was also the case in List Manager.
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EXM previews not sending
Problem
When doing a “send quick test” from the EXM review tab, we were seeing everything working as expected for the first few sends. However on subsequent sends (usually the 4th – 5th) the email was not sent and the spinner next to the send button took a long time. The XHR request to /sitecore/api/ssc/EXM/ExecuteSendQuickTest eventually timed out and showed the error “We are very sorry, but there has been a problem, please contact your system administrator.”. I thought about doing that….but that would probably cause some sideways looks given I’d be talking to myself.
This only appeared to be an issue in a Paas environment (we were unable to reproduce locally) on Sitecore 9.0.1 (with the EXM cumulative hotfix). This did not appear to be an issue with any dispatch tasks (just the “send quick test”).
Investigation
Investigating the CM logs revealed that the latter sends that were failing had the following entry, followed by not much at all:
ManagedPoolThread #6 07:36:59 INFO MessageTaskRunner is starting 0 e-mail dispatch worker threads.
Previous successful sends would see something more like :
INFO MessageTaskRunner is starting 10 e-mail dispatch worker threads.
Then a series of entries like the following indicating the thread spinning up, then exiting once no more work is required:
INFO E-mail dispatch worker thread ‘MessageTaskRunner worker thread 3’ is starting.
………
INFO E-mail dispatch worker thread ‘MessageTaskRunner worker thread 3’ did not find any active tasks and exits.
Solution
As this appeared to be a threading issue we experimented with various settings such as Numthreads & MaxGenerationThreads, but see similar issues for each. Just with varying number of threads spinning up/exiting on the successful attempts.
After discussing with support, they were able to identify a bug and provide a patch (ref 214025). This issue applies to Sitecore 9.01 and 9.02.
This patch replaces the implementation of the SendEmail processor in the SendEmail pipeline, which ensures that the thread semaphore is fully released for test sends. Without the patch EXM would only be able to send up to the amount of test messages equal to the MaxGenerationThreads setting as the threads are not properly released on previous attempts.
Dev's Encore 