Performance Query: Recurring workflow vs Windows Schedular, which one is better?

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Hi,

I have a scenario with our customer where I have to send marketing SMS and emails to the customers every night based on certain conditions. The requirement is to run a job every night after midnight, query the customers base of around 200,000 (and increasing @ 10K customers per month on average), fetch the customers with the pre-specified conditions (queries), and send them customized and in some cases personalized SMS and email messages.

The customer is using 2-tier architecture i.e. 1 App server and 1 db server.

Please note that there is another windows job running on a 3rd server, every 3 mins using windows schedular that fetches data from an external system and syncs in CRM using SDK.

Now I understand that there are two ways I can do this:

Create a recurring workflow and do the above job in a custom code activity.
Create a windows app and schedule the app using windows Task Schedular on a different server (like the one already in place as mentioned above)

I need recommendation from fellow consultants as to which approach will be the best (most efficient) in this scenario?

This discussion will help a lot of our community memebers to make such decisions in their implementations as this is a very common scenario we face on on-premise implementations.

Awaiting responses :)

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Community Member on at

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Aileen Gusni, Aiden Kaskela, Guido Preite ,
Will appreciate your input on this please.

Thanks,

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Sayhaitokumar 7,042 on at

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Hi Fahad,

I would like to suggest go with windows app. If you create recurring workflow as day goes on it will take more memories in the Async Process and the performance of the CRM will be degraded.

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Aiden Kaskela 19,696 on at

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Hi,

You can't really do this as a recurring workflow because sending out the messages will probably cause a timeout in your plugin (2 minutes). If you already have a server set up to handle recurring tasks, that's definitely the way to go.

Hope this helps! I'd appreciate if you'd mark this as Answering your question.

Thanks,

Aiden

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ashlega 34,477 on at

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If you are in CRM online, your workflow will have to complete all processing in under 2 minutes, or it will be terminated by CRM. It seems you are not online, so you may be able to handle this by not doing it in the sandbox. Still, if your client ever decides to move to the online environment, that'll become a problem

Other than that.. I don't know if there is a strong reason not to do it in CRM except, maybe, that you will be making it easier for the CRM server if you opted for an "application" approach since some of the processing will be happening outside of CRM)

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