Adjusting Email Fetch Frequency to 1 Minute

ait1

Hello osTicket Community,

We are currently using osTicket integrated with Office 365 through OAuth2 for email fetching. To improve the responsiveness of our support system, we are considering adjusting the email fetch frequency to once every minute. Before making this change, we have a few concerns and would appreciate any insights or experiences you can share.

osTicket Version v1.17.3 (ca95150) — v1.17.5 is available
Web Server Software Apache/2.4.41 (Ubuntu)
MySQL Version 8.0.39
PHP Version 8.1.18

Are there any known issues with Office 365 rate limits or API quotas when increasing the fetch frequency to once per minute?
Has anyone experienced throttling or blocking from Microsoft due to frequent API requests?
Has anyone successfully implemented a 1-minute fetch interval with osTicket and Office 365? If so, what challenges did you face, and how did you address them?
Any recommendations for monitoring and maintaining system health with this increased fetch frequency?

KevinTheJedi

ait1

First I want to strongly suggest upgrading to v1.18.1 or at the very least v1.17.5. It’s always best to stay on top of updates to get the latest bug fixes, security updates, and latest features. I would also suggest upgrading PHP to 8.2. PHP 8.3 is not supported yet but it’s coming with the next set of releases.

In my personal experience with customers that have high volumes of mail and a lot of system emails this is never really an issue.
Same as the above point; never really an issue. Of course people with such usage typically have Microsoft business/government accounts.
Of course you can however you have to think about the fact that the cron job should have enough time to complete before the next job is ran. Otherwise you could potentially have overlapping data. On each cron run osTicket grabs all system emails with fetching enabled, loops through each, logs into the first one, grabs the specified amount of mail, parses the mail one by one, creating tickets, logs into SMTP if necessary to send out alerts, and repeats for each parsed email and each system email address. So your server needs to be fast enough to do all of that within each cron run. Now there are things like celery that can scheduleand queue jobs and only execute the next once the running one completes but that’s up to you and they can be finicky/annoying at times. If you truly want to speed things up then Email Piping (local or remote) is the way to go as that’s near instant.
There isn’t really much other than monitoring server performance, cpu usage, etc. Database size can eventually become a factor especially if you intend to have a lot of attachments or large attachments. There are external file storage plugins available to help with that.

With this being said osTicket is simple and relatively easy to maintain. Just keep the server happy (ie. provide the appropriate resources it needs, clean the server often, the general spiel), stay on top of updates, and you should be fine. As with everyone I strongly suggest looking into optimizing the database (MySQL | MariaDB) for optimal system performance and longevity.

Cheers.