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Marketo Instance is suffering from sluggish performance

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Vinay_Kumar
Level 9 - Community Advisor

Marketo Instance is suffering from sluggish performance

Hi All,

I have a sluggish instance. The initial checks basically showed that campaigns were processing through backlogs normally. Being an online platform, different queues have different priority levels and all of those seemed to be moving normally.

There are no unnecessary trigger campaigns, no complex smart lists, or anything like which can be responsible for the slow performance. 

We are in discussion with the support team on this and they are looking into this issue. In the meantime, I am hoping to get some ideas/thoughts/solutions from community experts to resolve this issue.

 

TIA

 

 

2 ACCEPTED SOLUTIONS

Accepted Solutions
Darshil_Shah1
Level 10 - Community Advisor

Re: Marketo Instance is suffering from sluggish performance

There are number of things that you could check that might be behind the slow instance apart from active trigger campaigns, such as: a lot of synced CRM fields (you can remove fields from the sync that are no longer required and have become obsolete), too many campaigns with priority overridden to high/medium  would cause the ones with low priority to delay a lot, a lot of people in the DB (consider cleaning up the DB), a lot of assets in approved format listening for updates, try unapproving and archiving obsolete assets, deactivating engagement programs that are completed instead of leaving them in an on position even though no one will process through them in casts, etc. 

 

Also, when you say there aren't any unnecessary trigger campaigns, it doesn't mean that the ones that you have active aren't too much for the instance to handle. I'd advise you to convert as many active trigger campaigns as possible to batch campaigns (e.g., some low priority  updates can do equally well with them done on a nightly basis). Instead of trying to do a lot of things  immediately as soon as the action happens leading to a sluggish Marketo instance and critical updates getting delayed, it’s better to prioritize things and convert the lower priority ones to batches. Additionally, instead of using wait steps in regular campaigns, see if you can use executable campaigns instead. FWIW, executable campaigns are processed in a separate queue than the trigger/batch campaigns. 

 

Lastly, this recent article has got great tips on keeping the Marketo instance clean and snappy: 

How to Keep Your Marketo Instance Clean and Running Smoothly

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Vinay_Kumar
Level 9 - Community Advisor

Re: Marketo Instance is suffering from sluggish performance

We audited the instance deeply and performed certain actions according to our findings. Here are some actions that we took:

1. Updated the complex process to a simpler version keeping best practices and goals in mind. 

2. Deactivated unnecessary campaigns

3. Converted the trigger campaigns to batch campaigns wherever possible

4. Archived unnecessary assets

5. Created more segmentations

6. Removed unwanted leads from the database

7. Optimized Global System Processes

View solution in original post

8 REPLIES 8
Darshil_Shah1
Level 10 - Community Advisor

Re: Marketo Instance is suffering from sluggish performance

There are number of things that you could check that might be behind the slow instance apart from active trigger campaigns, such as: a lot of synced CRM fields (you can remove fields from the sync that are no longer required and have become obsolete), too many campaigns with priority overridden to high/medium  would cause the ones with low priority to delay a lot, a lot of people in the DB (consider cleaning up the DB), a lot of assets in approved format listening for updates, try unapproving and archiving obsolete assets, deactivating engagement programs that are completed instead of leaving them in an on position even though no one will process through them in casts, etc. 

 

Also, when you say there aren't any unnecessary trigger campaigns, it doesn't mean that the ones that you have active aren't too much for the instance to handle. I'd advise you to convert as many active trigger campaigns as possible to batch campaigns (e.g., some low priority  updates can do equally well with them done on a nightly basis). Instead of trying to do a lot of things  immediately as soon as the action happens leading to a sluggish Marketo instance and critical updates getting delayed, it’s better to prioritize things and convert the lower priority ones to batches. Additionally, instead of using wait steps in regular campaigns, see if you can use executable campaigns instead. FWIW, executable campaigns are processed in a separate queue than the trigger/batch campaigns. 

 

Lastly, this recent article has got great tips on keeping the Marketo instance clean and snappy: 

How to Keep Your Marketo Instance Clean and Running Smoothly

Vinay_Kumar
Level 9 - Community Advisor

Re: Marketo Instance is suffering from sluggish performance

Hi @Darshil_Shah1, Thank you for your input here.

We already have deactivated the unnecessary triggers and archived unused assets, already converted the campaigns to batches wherever possible, using simple smart lists. 

I'll review the CRM sync fields for any new possibilities. 

Am I still missing something important? 

 

Darshil_Shah1
Level 10 - Community Advisor

Re: Marketo Instance is suffering from sluggish performance

Cool! Thanks for confirming. The only thing that you're probably missing is even though you'd have converted all possible trigger campaigns to batch campaigns, but still the number of active triggers that you have are maybe just too many for the Marketo to handle resulting in the sluggish performance.

Steven_Vanderb3
Marketo Employee

Re: Marketo Instance is suffering from sluggish performance

You'll have to be more clear as to where you're seeing the slow performance (and please do provide very specific examples to the Customer Support team). UI loading is a different bottleneck than campaign processing which is a different bottleneck than Smart List or Report result loading.

Vinay_Kumar
Level 9 - Community Advisor

Re: Marketo Instance is suffering from sluggish performance

Campaign processing is getting delayed. It is creating campaign queue most of the times, even less leads are qualifying for the campaign. 

Vinay_Kumar
Level 9 - Community Advisor

Re: Marketo Instance is suffering from sluggish performance

We have some findings which might be one of the reason behind the sluggish performance and we are working on updating the same. Hopefully, we will see some improvements. 

Vinay_Kumar
Level 9 - Community Advisor

Re: Marketo Instance is suffering from sluggish performance

We audited the instance deeply and performed certain actions according to our findings. Here are some actions that we took:

1. Updated the complex process to a simpler version keeping best practices and goals in mind. 

2. Deactivated unnecessary campaigns

3. Converted the trigger campaigns to batch campaigns wherever possible

4. Archived unnecessary assets

5. Created more segmentations

6. Removed unwanted leads from the database

7. Optimized Global System Processes

Darshil_Shah1
Level 10 - Community Advisor

Re: Marketo Instance is suffering from sluggish performance

Thanks for posting an update here, @Vinay_Kumar ! I’m sure that this thread will be helpful to a lot of Marketo users. 😊