While we certainly prefer Qmail over Sendmail (for a variety of reasons) here is some information to help you optimize and work with Sendmail on your server.

There is a main configuartion file when dealing with sendmail.  This can be found at:

• /etc/sendmail.cf

This is the file that you will likely want to edit to make your optimizations.

There are numerous custom changes and modifications you could make to Sendmail.  Here are a couple we would suggest looking into:

• Change the Timeout.ident setting to be “Timeout.ident=0s”
• Configure Sendmail’s command-line submission tool to background itself after getting the email  instead of trying to deliver it to the main sendmail daemon (http://bit.ly/SaBuu)
• Setup your own DNS server.  Then configure sendmail to use your new DNS server to resolve MX and A records.
• Tune Sendmail (http://www.sendmail.org/~ca/email/doc8.12/TUNING)
• Try switching to Qmail or Postfix and you will likely see improved speed even with the default configurations of both Qmail and Postfix.

Using Qmail instead of Sendmail? View our other article on how to optimize Qmail

I often encounter situations where someone is dedicating their time to server specs yet overlooking some of the most basic optimization options available.  One of these basic optimization options include looking into your MySQL configuration and actually setting it to properly use the resources available on your server.

All ActiveCampaign products utilize a MySQL database.  The database is a critical part of the application and your MySQL configuration can result in your software being lightning fast or can force limited speed upon your applications.

Types of tables

Before you start to optimize MySQL you will need to know the basics.  There are two types of tables we use for our applications.  MyISAM and InnoDB.  While the differences are important – we will focus on configuration for this article.  There are different configuration options for both types of tables.  Thus the configuration you set your MySQL to may depend on the product(s) you are using.  For example, if you are only using 1-2-All you would want to optimize MySQL for InnoDB and you do not need to use as many resources for MyISAM.

Here is a list of table types for a couple of our products:

Email Marketing – Mostly InnoDB – Some MyISAM

Survey Software -  MyISAM

Knowledge Management – Mostly MyISAM – Some InnoDB

Live Chat – Mostly InnoDB – Some MyISAM

Help Desk – Mostly MyISAM – Some InnoDB

What to edit

For the basic MySQL configuration options you will want to edit the MySQL configuration file.  This file is called my.cnf or my.ini.

On a linux box you will usually find the file at: /etc/my.cnf

On a windows box you will usually find the file in your MySQL folder and the file name will be my.ini

Specific Optimization Tips

For MyISAM tables:

bulk_insert_buffer_size=32M
join_buffer_size=4M
key_buffer_size=128M
max_allowed_packet=32M
query_cache_limit=4M
read_buffer_size=1M
read_rnd_buffer_size=2M
sort_buffer_size=8M
table_cache=128
tmp_table_size=32M

These are modest values. They can be doubled or more based on the amount of RAM on your server.

For InnoDB tables:

innodb_buffer_pool_size=1G
innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=0

The buffer size should be 25-50% of your server’s RAM, if not more. Intensive programs benefit a lot from extra RAM.

Dig deeper

The information provided here is only scratching the surface of what you can do with MySQL configuration options.  If you have a host or system administrator they should be able to assist with such configuration changes.  For additional reading you may want to view the MySQL Performance Blog

One of our favorite mail transfer agents that we suggest is Qmail.  We find Qmail to be significantly faster than Sendmail (in most default scenarios) and quite easy for our clients to manage and optimize.

While there are numerous things you can do to improve sending speed of Qmail – one of the easiest is to adjust your concurrency settings.

There are a couple setting files that you will want to take a look at.  if you do not have these files you can try to create them.

• /var/qmail/control/concurrencyremote
  Usually is a default around 10 or 20. We suggest to increase this to 250 or above if your memory can handle it.   This is the file that you want to adjust.

• /var/qmail/control/concurrencylocal
  Usually is a default around 20 or 30.  You can increase this to a higher number. Please note however – when sending lots of mail (to users outside of your server) concurrencyremote will be the file you want to change.

The files should simply contain the number you wish to have for that concurrency type.  After you change the files (or create the files) you MUST restart the Qmail service on your server.  If you want to see the current settings that your Qmail is using you can run # /var/qmail/bin/qmail-showctl

There is a hard limit that is set when Qmail is built – so you do not want to go crazy with your concurrency settings.  Often you can push the concurrency up to 500 and in some default setups of Qmail you can go up to 1,000.  You should ensure that you have the memory/ram to back up your settings though.  If you set your concurrency remote to several hundred be prepared for Qmail to start using up more memory as you send.

As with all server changes your results and performance will be heavilly affected by a combination of your settings, server resources, and other server settings that can affect your services.  I suggest to make minor changes and then monitor your sending speeds and adjust as needed.

Check here for more email marketing tips.

Help Desk 3.0 development has begun….

We recently started work on Help Desk 3.0.  Version 3.0 will be a major update to the ActiveCampaign Help Desk Software package.

We will be incorporating hundreds of changes and additions including such things as:

• Rewriting the majority of the backend code
• Improving the speed and responsiveness of the entire application
• Leaving 99% of the source code unencoded
• CSS Based admin/public interfaces
• Escalation system
• SLA Management
• External Login Sources
• Much more….

While we have our development plans – we still want to know what you want to see in Help Desk 3.0.

Let us know what you want changed, what you wish was added, general feedback & comments, etc… Your feedback is greatly appreciated and will be taken into consideration for Help Desk 3.0.

Tell us what you want in the next version of SupportTrio!

It has been a while since the last major update of Knowledge Management. For the last couple of months we have been working on a major update.  A core part of this update is a complete rewrite of Knowledge Management’s backend.

We’ve optimized the database to handle much more data with greater speed, no more slow pages when there are a lot of articles and/or categories. Speaking of articles and categories, icons and tags can now be added as well as SEO urls: all categories and articles will have “search friendly” URLS that include article/category titles.

Knowledge Management will include better management features including simplified importing and syncing as well as improved content management. Ajax enabled features will eliminate the need to reload pages for minor actions, meaning increased page optimization and usability.

The admin side of Knowledge Management is almost done and we’re working to catch up on the public end. A major new feature on the public side is live edit, you can double click the article title/content (or category’s title/description) and edit it right there!

Update: 1 Reason Not To Install Zend Optimizer

Since this article was published in May of 2008, ActiveCampaign has discontinued use of Zend Optimizer and Ioncube in favor of our own solutions to enhance the speed and security of our applications. Consequently, there is no longer any additional software that you need to install in order to use our products, and you now have full access to the source code of all of our software.

We believe our software can help your business to succeed. We believe this so much that we want  to give you the opportunity to try it out for free for 30 days and make your own decision:

• Click here for a free trial of Email Marketing
• Click here for a free trial of Survey Software
• Click here for a free trial of Help Desk
• Click here for a free trial of Knowledge Management
• Click here for a free trial of Live Chat

Original Instructions for Installing Zend Optimizer on Your Web Server

One of the ways that we increase the overall speed and security of our web-based software is by pre-compiling the PHP code. The tools that we use to do this are called Zend Optimizer and Ioncube. You actually only need one or the other in order to encode PHP scripts, and I’m not aware of any performance benefit that either one enjoys over the other. The only reason that we use both of these products is to provide maximum compatibility with all the different types of web hosts and servers that are out there. That’s why, when you visit the downloads page in our online help desk, you’re always asked which version of the software you’d like to download: Zend or Ioncube.

Most people who don’t produce or use a lot of web-based software have never heard of either of these products and get a little flustered when confronted with the question of which they should download. If you’re using a shared web hosting account or have an in-house server admin running your web server, then you have a simple one-step solution: pick up the phone, call the admin, and ask which one you can use

If you’re running your own server, it’s still very simple. The first thing to do is to find out if your server can already run Ioncube scripts, since if it can there are no additional steps for you. The way to find this out is to:

• download our test script
• unzip and upload it to your web directory
• and then open it up in a web browser

You’ll see something like this:

As you can see, my own local test server is not able to run Ioncube-encoded scripts without additional setup, because I’m using the latest version of PHP, which has broken dynamic loading. That’s no big deal, because I went ahead and installed the free Zend Optimizer with just a couple of clicks, and now I’ll show you how to do the same.

Download Zend Optimizer

If you find this part challenging, you probably shouldn’t be trying to run your own web server! 

What you need to do is to download the Zend Optimizer package onto your web server. You can get it from http://www.zend.com/en/products/guard/downloads, where you’ll need to select the appropriate package for your server. So first select the radio button labeled “Zend Optimizer” (not the one labeled “Zend Guard,”) and then you’ll find that the dropdown box becomes populated with a list of server types that Zend Optimizer is available for. The chances are very good that the type of server you are using is supported by Zend Optimizer. Remember, folks, you’re installing this on your web server, not on your own local computer (unless your web site is served from your local machine), so you want to be doing all this from the server, and to select the option that corresponds to the operating system running on the web server.

Before you are allowed to download, you’ll have to register for an account on zend.com on the next page. Once you’ve downloaded the software, all that is left is to install it on the server. The instructions for doing this will vary depending on the type of server that you use. If it is a Windows IIS server, just double-click on the installer .exe file and follow the instructions that appear on the screen. On any other type of system, including Mac OS X and any Linux or Unix variant, you’ll find that the installation package is compressed, so you first need to extract it.

On Linux or Unix servers

• Open up a terminal window or get yourself out to the command line. You can decompress the package by entering the following at the command line prompt:
  • gunzip -c <package name> | tar xf -
• Then, from inside the installer package directory that is created when the package is unzipped, type:
  • ./install.
• Now you’ll see a nice pretty graphical installation wizard that will walk you through setting up Zend Optimizer on your server.

On servers running Mac OS X

Installation on a server running OS X is a little more complicated that you might like it to be, but is still very doable. The most complicated part is basically just that you have to use the command line, which many OS X users are not very familiar with. However, you can find a very good tutorial for going through this process here [link removed since the article disappeared!).

Now put it to good use!

Once you’ve got Zend Optimizer installed on your server, you should be able to run Zend-encoded PHP scripts right away. So now just grab a copy of the Zend version of whichever ActiveCampaign software product you’ve purchased, and follow the installation instructions in the docs/install.txt file (you can also find the instructions in our knowledge base.)

If you run into any problems with the Zend Optimizer installation or if you get an error message saying that Zend Optimizer is not installed on your server, check the Zend website for troubleshooting tips.

A handful of Email Marketing users reported a slower archive with Email Marketing 4.7.  We tracked down the issue and 4.70.2 takes care of that along with a couple other issues.  The speed issue occured on certain systems and was often due to older installs that have been upgraded time and time again in the past.

We encourage all users to upgrade to 4.70.2 to increase the speed of the archive.  If you continue to have any issues please submit a ticket and we will assist you right away.

visualEdit Work

We have continued finishing up work on visualEdit and have a couple of small items left. We adjusted how we were going to manage users and what not which caused a small delay in preparing for the beta. You can still signup at http://www.activecampaign.com/visualedit/ to be notified when the public beta is ready.

New Software Updates

• Email Marketing 4.61.2 was released with a number of bug fixes
• Live Chat Software 1.56.1 and Live Chat Desktop 1.16 was released with some new features and lots of speed enhancements.

Recently Added/Updated KB Articles

Syncing from custom fields
Customizing the way your name looks
What are Tasks? What are Time Entries?
POP Account Settings
POP3.php PEAR problems
Quick Start Guide
Viewing project time estimates versus actual time spent
Setting Up a New Project
Creating User Groups and Using Project Permissions
Integrating SwiftTraction With Help Desk Software
Custom Fields for Actions
Email Marketing A/B Split Module
Flash forms
Auto Remind Add On
EmailCheck Add On

We just released the latest version of Live Chat Software and Live Chat Desktop.

This new version of Live Chat has been in testing for some time and has shown a significant increase in speed and reduction in used resources on the server. Both the web and desktop clients have been updated with these speed and resource changes.

Download the updates and start chatting faster today!

After over a month of alpha and beta testing, the standard released version of ActiveCampaign Email Marketing now makes standard use of our new e-mail sending engine. The engine uses proprietary logic to maximize the abilities of your server setup in order to improve speed and efficiency, and to minimize send stalling.

Our beta testers achieved some pretty remarkable results: the average gains in sending speed hovered around 100%, with some users reporting speed increases of as much as 600%. In most cases, improved stability was also reported, so we’re expecting great results and recommending that all current Email Marketing users upgrade to the latest version.

In addition to updating the underlying sending framework, we’ve also added an option under Settings->Script Settings to make send-throttling much more intuitive, and to offer you more precise control over the way Email Marketing’s sending process interacts with your server.

Let’s say your server allows you to send 6,000 e-mails per hour. In order to ensure that Email Marketing never sends you over this limit, you’ll simply instruct it to try to send a maximum of 100 messages per minute. However, in some cases this limit will be higher than the server can comfortably send given the available resources, whether its due to other processes running on the server or simply due to a bottleneck somewhere in the system.

In this case, you would leave the maximum send rate at 100 per minute, but tweak Email Marketing’s pause setting to slow down the rate at which messages are processed and sent to the outgoing mail server. If you’re experiencing a lot of sending stalls, for example, you would want to decrease the number of messages processed between pauses, and increase the number of seconds that Email Marketing will pause before processing another chunk of messages.