Frugal Alerting - how to conserve processing time with Bamboo Alerts

With the price of a gallon of gas, lots of us are wondering what we can do to conserve energy, right? Well, CPU time is energy and there might be some things you can do to conserve CPU time when configuring alerts through your Bamboo Alert Plus Web Part.

Let me first give you a very high level glimpse of how the Bamboo Alert Plus Web Part works. Depending on the alert schedule you configure for an alert, a service wakes up and retrieves the items that could trigger an alert. The service processes each item, figures out if an alert message needs to be sent, and then sends the message.

As you may have read in our application notes or in an article in our KB, the best scenario for your Bamboo Alert Plus Web Part configuration is to install the Alert Plus Service on a server other than your SharePoint server to reduce the system load in large SharePoint environments. This service, as you can imagine, is a work horse - a gas guzzler as far as CPU cycles go. Any cycles it's using are not being used to by other SharePoint processes.

I know that not all of you have the luxury of spreading your SharePoint environment out to multiple servers - at least not yet. Until your organization really depends on the critical information SharePoint stores and everyone is using it all day long, you may need to make do with everything on one server. Well, as far as the Bamboo alerts go, there are some things you can do to minimize the load and conserve energy.

Here are a few tips to conserve processing time:

• When configuring How often are e-mails sent? on the Event tab of the user interface (see screen shot above), don't choose As Soon As Possible unless you really mean to. When you choose As Soon As Possible, the alert service wakes up every two minutes, grabs the data, and starts processing. When there is a lot of data to process, a thread may still be running when another starts after two minutes pass. If you can live with a schedule of every hour, you could save a lot of processing time. If you're not happy with the selections (As soon As Possible, Every Hour, Every Day, and Every Week) for the How often are e-mails sent? on the Event tab, you can configure a custom schedule on the Admin Options tab of the Alert Plus web part (see below). If you choose Use Custom Schedule, your selection on the Event tab is ignored.

• Also on the Event tab, when configuring What items in the list generate an alert?, don't choose All Items if you have an alternative. For example, if you want to send an alert whenever an item is created or modified, choose to alert on Items in a List View or Some Items (Advanced) rather than All Items.
  • Items in a List View. Using a list view is probably the easiest, especially if you aren't familiar with CAML. You can create a view and call it Things created or modified today. Set the filter criteria to "Modified = [Today] OR Created = [Today]". Choose Items in a List View and select your new view. This will minimize the amount of data the service needs to process each time it wakes up to do work.
  • Some Items (Advanced). If you choose Some Items (Advanced), you will need to supply a CAML query to identify the items in the list to process. If you're not a CAML expert, use the Criteria Builder - it's easy. To minimize the amount of data the service needs to process, you can build a CAML query that filters the data so only the items created or modified today are included. An example of this kind of CAML query is shown below:

<Query><Where><Or>
<Eq><FieldRef Name="Created" /><Value Type="DateTime"><Today /></Value></Eq>;
<Eq><FieldRef Name="Modified" /><Value Type="DateTime"><Today /></Value></Eq>;
</Or></Where></Query>

So, there you have it - a way to make a difference. And don't forget to turn off the lights when you leave the room!