We experience larger and larger demands for stability and data amount for Contour forms. Recently we had a costumer who made a quiz for an iPad 2 and the answers poured in and ended in at 36.000 answers in a few days.
One issue we had was exporting the many rows to a CSV file, but that got fixed by Tim here (Thanks Tim).
Another issue we have had is that if we had complaints that the amount of entries in the form and the amount of e-mails received by Contour doesn't match. Is there any way to debug this specific issue? Is the sending of e-mails logged any where?
I guess my main question is, is Contour the right choise for data amounts of that size (like 36.000 submissions in a few days and not spread over the whole day, but mainly in the hours around the end of ordinary job hours)? And if the answer is yes, is that based on a standard setup or how is it recommended to optimize the setup for this load?
Is the total number of emails received less than the number of records?
I don't think Contour logs the actual emails, but the SMTP server that you're using to send the emails on the webs server shoudl be logging stuff. You can always look at the logs for the SMTP server using a log file viewer and try and find all the ones that are for the form. With regards to emails going missing, it could be a number of things:
1) temporary problem with the mail server, failed mails should be logged by the SMTP server
2) emails have been flagged as spam (this is REALLY common, whenver we have an issue like this, 90% of the time, the email turns up in the clients spam folder, or in the spam filter on their mail server)
3) invalid destinaton address (if all the emails are going to the same address that shoudln't be an issue here)
Hope that helps! I've not run Contour forms with anything like that kind of traffic though, so I'm not sure if there's anything that can be done to optimise it.
I missed to inform that this is the e-mails received by the administrator whenever someone uses the form frontend. The mailserver used is a big mail hotel, so fall outs is of course a possibility but not something my first bet would be on. Spam shouldn't be a problem as the mails missing are not from some point in time and onwords but random in between.
We have received less e-mails than entries in the db.
Maybe a send log could be a feature request for Contour for Umb 5...
Emails get flagged as spam depending on the content, so it's definitley possible for random emails to get flagged as spam if there's free text fields in the form. We had an enquiry to a medical site that vanished and ended up being in the client's spam folder, because the customer had enquired about Viagra (which is high on most spam filters word lists)!
:)
I'd be inclined to check the mail server first, when we've had issues like this before and have checked the mail logs (most of our sites use the local SMTP service) the emails are almost always sent ok. Contour just uses the standard .Net send mail methods, so there's not too much that can go wrong, other than the email server being unreachable for some reason (a possibility if the mail server is a spearate box).
If you need to test to see if there's a problem with Contour, you could set up a test page with the same form on it, and then use a browser testing framework like Selenium or similar to submit the form with random text a lot of times and see if the number of emails that you receieve matches the number of entries?
Contour best practice at larger submissions?
We experience larger and larger demands for stability and data amount for Contour forms. Recently we had a costumer who made a quiz for an iPad 2 and the answers poured in and ended in at 36.000 answers in a few days.
One issue we had was exporting the many rows to a CSV file, but that got fixed by Tim here (Thanks Tim).
Another issue we have had is that if we had complaints that the amount of entries in the form and the amount of e-mails received by Contour doesn't match. Is there any way to debug this specific issue? Is the sending of e-mails logged any where?
I guess my main question is, is Contour the right choise for data amounts of that size (like 36.000 submissions in a few days and not spread over the whole day, but mainly in the hours around the end of ordinary job hours)? And if the answer is yes, is that based on a standard setup or how is it recommended to optimize the setup for this load?
Hiya,
Is the total number of emails received less than the number of records?
I don't think Contour logs the actual emails, but the SMTP server that you're using to send the emails on the webs server shoudl be logging stuff. You can always look at the logs for the SMTP server using a log file viewer and try and find all the ones that are for the form. With regards to emails going missing, it could be a number of things:
1) temporary problem with the mail server, failed mails should be logged by the SMTP server
2) emails have been flagged as spam (this is REALLY common, whenver we have an issue like this, 90% of the time, the email turns up in the clients spam folder, or in the spam filter on their mail server)
3) invalid destinaton address (if all the emails are going to the same address that shoudln't be an issue here)
Hope that helps! I've not run Contour forms with anything like that kind of traffic though, so I'm not sure if there's anything that can be done to optimise it.
I missed to inform that this is the e-mails received by the administrator whenever someone uses the form frontend. The mailserver used is a big mail hotel, so fall outs is of course a possibility but not something my first bet would be on. Spam shouldn't be a problem as the mails missing are not from some point in time and onwords but random in between.
We have received less e-mails than entries in the db.
Maybe a send log could be a feature request for Contour for Umb 5...
Emails get flagged as spam depending on the content, so it's definitley possible for random emails to get flagged as spam if there's free text fields in the form. We had an enquiry to a medical site that vanished and ended up being in the client's spam folder, because the customer had enquired about Viagra (which is high on most spam filters word lists)!
:)
I'd be inclined to check the mail server first, when we've had issues like this before and have checked the mail logs (most of our sites use the local SMTP service) the emails are almost always sent ok. Contour just uses the standard .Net send mail methods, so there's not too much that can go wrong, other than the email server being unreachable for some reason (a possibility if the mail server is a spearate box).
If you need to test to see if there's a problem with Contour, you could set up a test page with the same form on it, and then use a browser testing framework like Selenium or similar to submit the form with random text a lot of times and see if the number of emails that you receieve matches the number of entries?
Thanks Tim and sorry for the late reply!
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