Pam, thank you so much for posting this, I have been dealing with a database lag issue for about 6 months - seems to be twofold; 1) slow to right form submit field values to database up to 10 minutes lags impacting my smart campaign triggers/flows like you mention above and 2) slow to update Marketo UI. Both issues are intermittent where I see a lag of 10 to 20 minutes. When I create a support ticket or #1 they tell me to add a wait step and this is expected behavior. Regarding #2, here's an explanation from support, which I totally appreciate the time spent to explain however I don't feel it is acceptable to have intermittent lags that take up to 20 minutes or to have to add 10 minute wait steps for form data to write to database. I've been using Marketo for over 10 years and never had this problem until recently. I think there must be a reason for this to happen recently and requires a fix. We can't be the only folks experiencing this. Explanation: There are two main processors we use in Marketo. One of them is faster to write to but is slower to search from, this is used for things like the Lead detail pages, and the other is slower to write to but is much faster to search from, this is used for things like our Smart Lists. Whenever activities are processed in Marketo, they are written in both places. First, they are written to the one that writes faster and then to the one that writes slower. In this way, they can only be written to one at a time. When the activity makes it to the person's activity log, the Flow Step shows as processed, i.e. when the box shows as Completed. Yet, the activity may still be writing to the second database which is why the activity is not always showing when we load the Campaign Results. However, once this data is indexed and written here, it is much faster to search for which is one way we optimize things like Smart Lists. For context, this is in no way meant to be a comprehensive breakdown on how the different processors work, it is only meant to serve as a high level overview, to help shed light on the perceived lag. Beyond this, we would not be able to discuss the infrastructure further as it is proprietary. But it is in this way, that we would see this behavior as expected. There is not a benchmark or expectation for how long it takes for the activity to write to this database.
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