Hello guys, 

    I'm working with a customer who is on 2016 R1, places about 3 millions calls per month, and has about 300 Campaigns pointing to the same contact lists (2) that have 1.8 millions records and the other one 1.5 millions records. My research, findings, experience and common sense says that they should have a single table/Contact list per Campaign in order to improve performance and resolve many of the issues they are experiencing but I wanted to get your input on this. 

I also have the following questions. 

1. Can the Outbound Contact list be indexed? 
2. Is there a maximum recommended size for the Dialer_Config.xml file ? 

Thank you.
#Outbound

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Ronnie Padron
Sr. Genesys/ININ Consultant
ronnedith@yahoo.com
312-428-8613
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Ronnie,

The size of the contact list is a little concerning. Yes they can index the outbound contact list (and in this case they definitely should).
Breaking the contact list up so that there is one per campaign does make sense, but there are multiple reasons why a customer would want to keep them in one table. For example, if they are automatically populating the contact list from a data source (not through Administrator/ICBM), they most likely use the single table as that is the easiest to program. Custom reporting could also be affected by using multiple contact list tables.
If you can give some examples of issues they're having we may be able to help in proposing solutions. 
For your second question, I haven't seen any size limitations for the Dialer_Config.xml file, however the larger that it is, the longer it will take to load the information into the Dialer container. If possible, I would try to back up the file regularly to prevent any issues should something fail to load, or become corrupted.

Phil

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Phil Chapman
Sr. Solution Engineer
Altivon
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Original Message:
Sent: 11-27-2018 17:41
From: Ronnedith Padron
Subject: Contact list tables and Dialer Campaigns

Hello guys,

    I'm working with a customer who is on 2016 R1, places about 3 millions calls per month, and has about 300 Campaigns pointing to the same contact lists (2) that have 1.8 millions records and the other one 1.5 millions records. My research, findings, experience and common sense says that they should have a single table/Contact list per Campaign in order to improve performance and resolve many of the issues they are experiencing but I wanted to get your input on this.

I also have the following questions.

1. Can the Outbound Contact list be indexed?
2. Is there a maximum recommended size for the Dialer_Config.xml file ?

Thank you.
#Outbound

------------------------------
Ronnie Padron
Sr. Genesys/ININ Consultant
ronnedith@yahoo.com
312-428-8613
------------------------------

When I reached out to Genesys on a similar question they pointed me to a help document which of course I don't have handy. However going off memory the contact list is not the concern but they do say the number of records in the ContactList_PND table should not exceed 2M records. In other words it is possible there are records in your contact lists which are not being watched by dialer and thus are not inserting a record in the PND table. On the flip side if you have multiple contact columns then there could be many more rows on the PND table as every contact number needs a PND record.

The other limitation they call out is number of columns in the contact list. The contact list is not to exceed 200 total columns. 

As far as indexes go I believe dialer builds indexes on the contact list automatically, you may want to go see but I suspect you should have some indexes on the table already. With this being said if you are doing lots of inserts or deletes from the table you will want to make sure the indexes and statistics are being updated regularly. 

Lastly everything is always a general guideline and the actual maxes could be much higher or lower based on actual usage and the specs on the SQL server itself. You may want to break down into smaller contact lists as you mention this should improve performance but I do know customers like the idea of one mega list which any campaign could call off of at any time even if they never actually use the feature. This is always a balancing act between trying to keep the system stable and give the customer the flexibility the want/think they need.

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Mark Tatera
ConvergeOne

Opinions are my own and not the views of my employer. Any suggestions or programming changes I suggest come with no warranty and should be tried at your own risk.
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 11-27-2018 17:41
From: Ronnedith Padron
Subject: Contact list tables and Dialer Campaigns

Hello guys,

    I'm working with a customer who is on 2016 R1, places about 3 millions calls per month, and has about 300 Campaigns pointing to the same contact lists (2) that have 1.8 millions records and the other one 1.5 millions records. My research, findings, experience and common sense says that they should have a single table/Contact list per Campaign in order to improve performance and resolve many of the issues they are experiencing but I wanted to get your input on this.

I also have the following questions.

1. Can the Outbound Contact list be indexed?
2. Is there a maximum recommended size for the Dialer_Config.xml file ?

Thank you.
#Outbound

------------------------------
Ronnie Padron
Sr. Genesys/ININ Consultant
ronnedith@yahoo.com
312-428-8613
------------------------------

Unless the recommendations have recently changed, you most definitely should not add indexes to your contact list tables. The problem is that every time the table is written to, the indexes need to be updated. Since Dialer hits the contact list pretty hard, that additional overhead can bomb performance of the database server. Indexes are great for improving read speed but, like everything, they come at a price and that price is write overhead. I will check though!

As to contact list size, it isn't actually the size of the contact list that is a limiting factor, but the size of the PND table (i.e. how many telephone numbers are there across all the contacts combined?) Again, I will check, but the last time I looked this was 2,000,000 records. So if your contacts only have one number each, you should be fine.