PublishJobCleanUp and PublishOperationAgeBasedCleanUp tasks in Sitecore Publishing Service

We have been using Sitecore Publishing Service for a while now and it has helped to reduce the publishing time. It takes publishing operations to a separate server which is good architecture. Any hiccups on the publishing service side don't impact our Sitecore servers directly and we have been enjoying it so far.

The Problem..

We have faced few bumps as well on our publishing service ride. We have been facing an issue where our Sitecore Publishing Service will get unresponsive after a week of acting normal. This blocks publish operations, publishing dashboard flashes errors and content stops getting pushed to live servers. As a quick fix, we restart the publishing service and that helps to clear the clutter. We have been working on finding a permanent fix for it.

The Solution.. (for now)

We got in touch with Sitecore Support. After analyzing our application, logs etc. they suggested that our application publishes more than what Sitecore publishing service's default settings allow. In other words, we are publishing too much content and Sitecore publishing service's default setup did not expect that aggressive publishing. They advised us to tune some of our publishing service settings to support this excessive publishing.

They suggested that we should try to reduce the PublishJobCleanUp and PublishOperationAgeBasedCleanUp task settings to lower value so that these tasks run more often and clear the excess amount of publishing data that remains stuck in publishing system which causes publishing service to get unresponsive. These settings can be found in following file -

<publishing service path>\sitecore\Sitecore.Framework.Plugin.Publishing\Config\sc.publishing.web.command.services.xml

The PublishJobCleanUp Task removes any publishing jobs that are over a certain age. It also removes the jobs associated manifests and manifest results. By default, it looks like this -

The PublishOperationAgeBasedCleanup Task removes any publishing operations that are over a certain age. By default, it looks like this -

We started by reducing the JobAge for PublishJobCleanUp to 3.00:00:00 and PublishOperationAge for PublishOperationAgeBasedCleanup to 15.00:00:00. It is generally good practice to first reduce such settings by 50% and check if it resolves the problem or not. If not, then further resolve it by another 50%.

I will keep you updated on how useful updating these settings was for our publishing service.

Hope it helps, thanks for reading!!

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