Sitecore EventQueue Table growing out of control

Question

We are having an issue with the EventQueue table growing very fast at times, up to 3k records a second, and never clearing records (30 million as of right now). Our environment

Answer 1

1. On CM publish, the publish request is sent to the EventQueue table on the CD db where it is processed as per the instance's publishing schedule.
2. The InstanceName column in the EventQueue table stores the unique name of each Sitecore instance (by default this is Machine Name + IIS Instance Name, but can be set in web.config). This enables events to be picked up by an individual CD instance in a load balanced environment.

3. The EventQueue table is cleared by a Sitecore task defined in the element in the web.config, although I've seen this misbehave in the past. By default, it is set as follows:

   1

I've previously run into high loads on the EventQueue and PublishQueue tables and would recommend trying the following (some of which were suggested from Sitecore support):

• Reduce the interval of the CleanupEventQueue agent (above)
• Reduce the DaysToKeep setting on the CleanupEventQueue (also CleanupPublishQueue wouldn't hurt)
• Create a scheduled SQL job to run the clean up script outlined in the CMS Tuning Guide (Page 10: http://sdn.sitecore.net/upload/sitecore7/70/cms_tuning_guide_sc70-usletter.pdf)

Finally, from Sitecore support:

Sitecore recommends that the number of rows (entries) in the History, PublishQueue, and EventQueue tables would be less than 1000.