Sitecore 10.1 publishing stuck

Question

We upgraded to Sitecore 10.1 from Sitecore 8.2. I am facing publishing issues.

I have migrated master database content in Sitecore 10.1. The publishing of some sites to the web database are fine. Some sites take few hours to publish but they finish successfully without any errors.

Some of the content stuck after number of items. For example, I published an item with child items (around 60 child items) and it was stuck after 46 items. There were no errors in the log and after stuck on the same 46 item, If I leave the page open for couple of hours then the page redirects to the login page. Some of the successful published items which take few hours to publish don't result in redirecting to the login page. This is just happening with the stuck items.

Its very difficult to figure out the issue because there are no failures in the log. Most of the content published fine but this is happening with very few items.

I cleared the publishing queue, restarted website several times and published the items with Smart/ Republish optons.

Any recommendations?

Answer 1

If it happens only when you select the "Publish related items" option in the "Publish Item" dialogue, then it must be related to the deep scan feature. Starting from version 9 the deep scan setting is enabled by default.

When the deep scan feature is used, it affects publishing speed of related items. Sitecore documentation says:

The deep scan setting determines if related items are published recursively, that is, whether to publish related items of related items):

• If deep scan is enabled, related items are published recursively - that is, related items of related items are also published. Deep scan is enabled by default.
• If deep scan is disabled, only directly related items are published.

You can disable deep scan to reduce the number of publishing operations and improve performance.

You may want to disable the deep scan setting to revert back to the publishing logic you had in Sitecore 8.2. It can be done by adding the following config patch:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<configuration>
    <sitecore role:define="ContentManagement">
        <settings>
         <setting name="Publishing.DeepScanRelatedItems" value="false"/>
        </settings>
    </sitecore>
</configuration>