Does publishing items too often affect CD performance?

Question

We have a Sitecore solution which has a CM server and a CD server. The solution uses Sitecore publishing service.

The editors publishes items every 30 seconds from the CM server.

My understanding is that each publish will clear HTML cache which is not good for the performance. But besides that, is there any other drawbacks about publishing items too often?

What can be done to improve the site performance if the editors insist that they need to publish that often?

Answer 1

Every request made to your site that is not cached by a CDN will have some impact on your CD servers.

I would first start with addressing how you make your site as fast as possible for the majority of time visitors come to your site.

General performance considerations:

These are issues you can address to provide a well performing site regardless of CMS technology.

• Are you caching entire pages with a CDN like Cloudflare and Akamai? A page returned by an edge cache could have a response time of 35ms while hitting Sitecore CDN servers have a response time 10x slower.
• Are assets such as JavaScript, StyleSheets, and Images cached by a CDN? Most of your assets may never change or are the exact same for 6-12 months. This could significantly reduce the load on your servers.
• Have you ensured that assets like images are optimized for the web? A 15 MB banner image could wreak havoc on your performance metrics.
• The list goes on and is likely never ending; you simply abandon further efforts when it's good enough.

Behavioral considerations:

These are things to think about when approaching Editors about habits they have that impacts site performance.

• Is scheduled publishing an option?
• Is there a legal or business reason that everything is treated as critical and does that outweigh any perceived performance issues?
• Can the Editors be trained to use a Staging/Preview version of the site which allows for an immediate review of content before going to the Live site?