Site Publishing Issue

Question

We have upgraded site from sitecore 8.0 rev.150223 (8.0 Update-2) to Sitecore 8.2 rev. 170614 (8.2 Update-4). This is content heavy site. When I Publish individual nodes, there is no problem in publishing but when we hit Publish Site, after 4500000 items published we are getting error and publishing stop there.

Getting this error -

The publishing process was unexpectedly interrupted.

Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.

Exception Details: System.Exception: The publishing process was unexpectedly interrupted.

Source Error: 

An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the current web request. Information regarding the origin and location of the exception can be identified using the exception stack trace below.

Stack Trace: 


[Exception: The publishing process was unexpectedly interrupted.]
   Sitecore.Shell.Applications.Dialogs.Publish.PublishForm.CheckStatus() +1181

[TargetInvocationException: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation.]
   System.RuntimeMethodHandle.InvokeMethod(Object target, Object[] arguments, Signature sig, Boolean constructor) +0
   System.Reflection.RuntimeMethodInfo.UnsafeInvokeInternal(Object obj, Object[] parameters, Object[] arguments) +229
   System.Reflection.RuntimeMethodInfo.Invoke(Object obj, BindingFlags invokeAttr, Binder binder, Object[] parameters, CultureInfo culture) +211
   Sitecore.Shell.Framework.Commands.MethodCommandProcessor.Invoke(PipelineArgs args) +534
   Sitecore.Nexus.Pipelines.NexusPipelineApi.Resume(PipelineArgs args, Pipeline pipeline) +398
   Sitecore.Pipelines.Pipeline.Start(PipelineArgs args, Boolean atomic) +366
   Sitecore.Shell.Framework.Commands.MethodCommand.Execute(CommandContext context) +632
   Sitecore.Web.UI.Sheer.ClientPage.OnPreRender(EventArgs e) +568
   System.Web.UI.Control.PreRenderRecursiveInternal() +113
   System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint) +4297

Anyone has any idea?

Answer 1

I think you question has two aspects which need to be handled separately:

1- Publish failing after a period of time

2- The slowness and time it takes to perform a full publish.

Publish failing after a period of time

The reason why it fails can be for many reasons most likely one item is corrupted or requesting something that it can't find, for example a required language it can't find, or a custom event handler being called which is throwing an exception, or anything really. To make your life easier you can have a clean Sitecore 8.2 rev. 170614 site running and compare the publish configurations against yours on the showconfig page. This will help you figure out whether you have any custom events running that may be leading to the exception or pinpoint possible causes.

The slowness and time it takes to perform a full publish

As already suggesed on comments Sitecore has released a publishing service which comes with a module that can be used and helps scaling the publishing mechanism. This currently is not an out-of-the-box module but it does work well. If you use it you need to understand that now your Sitecore instance will use that publishing service to run any publishing as opposed to the out-of-the-box. It also requires a few things like .Net core. This module is really good if you need to perform distributed publishing as well.

Answer 2

You can make use of the Sitecore Publishing Module. This will takes less than 5 hours to publish. But as you mentioned in the comment above, you cannot use the publishing service right now.

Possible solution

Since you just did an upgrade, sitecore will identify all the items to be published. If you are performing an incremental publish and still taking too much time and at the end crashed, try the following steps:

1. Clear the publish queue table on master core and web.

2. Perform publishing in batches

Once done, try to launch an incremental publish again. This should now takes less time.