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Best practices for optimizing email listener performance

Updated on April 6, 2022

You can manage a high number of incoming email messages in your application by increasing the throughput of your email listener. To ensure that you scale your email listener to meet your organization's needs, review the guidelines for optimizing email listener performance.

Note: Email providers control the number of email messages that they receive in a given period. The following guidelines improve performance provided that you do not exceed the limit defined by your email provider.

Reduce the risk of throttling

If you have high throughput and you are using an online email provider, check your email provider’s documentation to determine whether the email provider has a throttling limit. You can reduce the risk of throttling by configuring a low number of nodes and concurrent threads, for example, two nodes and three threads. Then, slowly increase the number of nodes and threads until you meet your organization's throughput requirements. If the email listener is throttled, decrease the number of nodes and threads until the listener is stable. Note that increasing the number of nodes increases performance at a higher rate than increasing the number of concurrent threads.

For more information about adjusting your email listener to manage throttling, see Troubleshooting email listeners. For more information about email listener behavior in Pega Platform during throttling, see Throttling during email processing.

Manage a high number of emails in your inbox

To ensure that your email listener is able to handle a large influx of emails in your inbox, configure the following options:

  • Increase the maximum number of messages that your listener processes before pausing for a rest period. You can configure this option in the Maximum number of messages field on the Properties tab of your email listener.
    Note: Setting a maximum value higher than 10 increases the lag time between when an email listener pulls an email message into the application and when the system creates a case.
  • Decrease the duration of your email listener's rest period by changing the value in the Latency period field on the Properties tab of your email listener. By decreasing the latency period, the listener wakes up more frequently to check the inbox for unread messages. However, reducing the latency period might also decrease the capacity of the node.

Decrease processing time of emails

Ensure that your listener processes messages within a short period of time after they are pulled into Pega Platform by configuring the following options:

  • Decrease the duration of your email listener's rest period so that the email listener wakes up more frequently to check the inbox for unread messages. Enter a value, for example, 30 seconds, in the Latency period field on the Properties tab of your email listener.
  • Decrease the maximum number of messages that your listener processes before pausing for a rest period, for example, 50 messages. Enter this value in the Maximum number of messages field on the Properties tab of your email listener. By decreasing the maximum value, the listener processes fewer messages at once, so processing time is shorter.
    Note: Reducing the maximum number of messages that your email listener processes might decrease overall throughput if the number of incoming messages is significantly high.
  • Previous topic Specifying additional patterns for filtering out autoreply messages
  • Next topic Ensuring messages are processed before switching your email protocol to Microsoft Graph

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