Following Amazon SES best practices with Blackfire

Sebastian Grodzicki, GoldenLine’s CTO, took advantage of Blackfire to improve his platform’s e-mail throughput.

By Christophe Dujarric, on Feb 05, 2016

GoldenLine is a Polish online recruitment platform. Sebastian Grodzicki (@sebgrodzicki), GoldenLine’s CTO, took advantage of Blackfire to improve his platform’s e-mail throughput.

Their e-mail delivery relies on a blend of Swiftmailer, MySQL and Amazon SES. Recently noticing that the queue was pretty slow in sending e-mails, Sebastian started thinking about using Redis. But a quick benchmark with Blackfire.io actually lead him to follow Amazon SES best practices and use the Amazon SES query API instead of the SMTP endpoint.

His benchmark was on how many e-mails could be sent in 5 minutes:

  • With the SMTP Endpoint: 700 e-mails
  • With the API: 1480 e-mails

He managed to double the throughput with a simple configuration, instead of trying to solve the issue by implementing a caching system.

Sebastian wrote an article about his findings during the #FireUpMyMac contest. Read it in full here.

Christophe Dujarric

Christophe is the Chief Product Officer at Blackfire. He's an engineer, but probably one of the least "tech" people in the company. He's wearing many hats, from product management to marketing and sales. He loves the beauty of simple solutions that solve actual problems.
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