# App seems slow when emailing

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/app-seems-slow-when-emailing/107824>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [June 26, 2007, 3:22pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/app-seems-slow-when-emailing/107824 "2007-06-26T15:22:34Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 5\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![jjkiesch](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/bc79bd/32.png) [@jjkiesch](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jjkiesch)\
**Post date:** [June 26, 2007, 3:22pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/app-seems-slow-when-emailing/107824/1 "2007-06-26T15:22:34Z")

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i’ve got an app that works well until actions that send email are  
used. it seems that the user is having to wait for rails to send the  
email before they get to the next page.

is there an easy way to move on to the next action or page while the  
email is still trying to send?

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**Author:** ![jjkiesch](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/bc79bd/32.png) [@jjkiesch](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jjkiesch)\
**Post date:** [June 26, 2007, 3:40pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/app-seems-slow-when-emailing/107824/2 "2007-06-26T15:40:36Z")

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Josh wrote:

> i’ve got an app that works well until actions that send email are  
> used. it seems that the user is having to wait for rails to send the  
> email before they get to the next page.
> 
> is there an easy way to move on to the next action or page while the  
> email is still trying to send?

Unless the email in question is really huge, you can make this fast with  
a local SMTP server which would be in charge of relaying the email. Use  
SMTP for delivery and not sendmail when configuring ActionMailer. This  
actually makes a big difference on small emails on my setup.

If the email is huge, you might use BackgrounDRb to handle the process.

Lionel

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![jjkiesch](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/bc79bd/32.png) [@jjkiesch](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jjkiesch)\
**Post date:** [June 26, 2007, 5:08pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/app-seems-slow-when-emailing/107824/3 "2007-06-26T17:08:45Z")

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unfortunately i am using an external smtp server. currently there’s  
not much i can do about that. i didn’t know about backgrounddrb  
though. looks really cool, so hopefully that’s what i need.

On Jun 26, 8:39 am, Lionel B. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid)

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**Author:** ![jjkiesch](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/bc79bd/32.png) [@jjkiesch](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jjkiesch)\
**Post date:** [June 26, 2007, 6:56pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/app-seems-slow-when-emailing/107824/4 "2007-06-26T18:56:01Z")

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Hey Josh,

Another option is to use activemessaging - like backgrounDRb it lets you  
do  
things asynchronously so your controller can return, but rather than a  
process model, it is a messaging model.

[http://code.google.com/p/activemessaging/](http://code.google.com/p/activemessaging/)

I know several people using this for doing email notifications  
(including  
me) - e.g. some event occurs, controller pushes a message on a queue,  
then a  
processor asynchronously pops off this message and spends whatever time  
is  
necessary to handle it and send out a bunch of emails to ‘subscribers’.

Cheers,

-Andrew K.  
[http://www.beginsinwonder.com](http://www.beginsinwonder.com)

On 6/26/07, Josh [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote:

> > > used. it seems that the user is having to wait for rails to send the  
> > > If the email is huge, you might use BackgrounDRb to handle the process.
> > 
> > Lionel
> 
> >

–  
Andrew K.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![jjkiesch](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/bc79bd/32.png) [@jjkiesch](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jjkiesch)\
**Post date:** [June 26, 2007, 8:38pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/app-seems-slow-when-emailing/107824/5 "2007-06-26T20:38:14Z")

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For a simpler solution you might just create a table to hold events  
that need to be processed by an outside application. Message queues  
are great but for something like sending email messages you also need  
some way to track event failures and retry at a later time. Which  
means you would need a separate table to do that on top of the message  
queue. For a larger system I’d probably use a queue and have the  
event processing on a completely separate server with it’s own  
database, but that’s probably overkill for most applications.

Chris