Avoid publishing queues / allow concurrent users to publish on Sitecore 8.1

Question

Recently I came across a request from my client that they often get publishing queued. When we are in initial stage we only have few sites any very minimal users who is working on our CM. But currently we have a huge number of sites and vast number of users who working on a single instance. So whenever a user publishes an item it often ends with publishing queues since some one is already initiated a publishing.

Is there any alternative approach to handle this situation where allowing concurrent users to publish their items without queuing.

I read an article of parallel publishing from Sitecore . But this doesn't fulfill my above requirement. Can someone suggest an idea for it. The version that we are using is Sitecore 8.1

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Sitecore has released on 8.2 the publishing service which is not built into the product but it's a service that works really well for that. This is more as an FYI.

But you said you are running on 8.1 so the only way you can get around that is by establishing processes if upgrading is not an option.

For example do all of those users need publishing permissions?

Can you have a role and assign to key users to trigger the publish avoiding the trigger to be pushed at the same time?

Can you have a publish scheduled task which pushes content live at a specific time?

Do you have workflow properly setup which as the last step triggers a publish?

There are all things you can look into and explore but in a nutshell for Sitecore 8.1 and lower versions you are stuck with the out of the box publishing system which behaves exactly like you described.

Update:

If you trigger a publish programatically through the publish manager(custom processor or a simple call to it) your call will end up at some point creating the publish job and setting the jobstate to queued.

Here is the method that does that(cleaned up for clarity):

PublishStatus publishStatus = new PublishStatus();
  JobOptions options1 = new JobOptions(nameof (Publish), this.publishManager.GetType().Name, "publisher", (object) this.publishManager, "DoPublish", new object[2]
  {
    (object) options,
    (object) publishStatus
  });

  options1.AfterLife = TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds((double) (Settings.Publishing.PublishDialogPollingInterval * 2));
  options1.ExecuteInManagedThreadPool = Settings.Publishing.ExecuteInManagedThreadPool;
  publishStatus.SetState(JobState.Queued);
  Job job = JobManager.Start(options1);