Managing activities with high response volumes

Managing activities with high response volumes requires thoughtful planning and careful setup. This guide highlights key considerations and practical steps to help assist in the smooth running of your activity, even under heavy demand.

There are practical considerations when working with large volumes of data, particularly within the admin interface and during periods of high submission traffic.

If your activity is expecting high response rates, consider the following:

  • Stagger communications: Avoid sending large volumes of emails at once, as it’s natural for many recipients to click through immediately, which can slow down the site. Instead, schedule communications in batches to spread traffic more evenly.
  • Avoid opening large activities at the same time: Try not to have more than one high volume activity open on your site at a time, as this may result in even higher traffic, thus, further slowing down your site or making it susceptible to errors.

Performance may begin to degrade if a large number of responses are submitted in a short period of time, the limit is usually around 2,500 submissions within a 10-minute window. When you go over 2,500 submissions within that 10 minute window, this is when your Citizen Space site may start to encounter errors.

  • Minimise admin activity during peak times: During high-traffic periods, limit administrative actions on the platform to ensure optimal performance for respondents and reduce the risk of slowdowns.

Please note that for high-volume activities, it’s best practice to export data regularly and download responses in batches, rather than handling very large files all at once. Citizen Space’s filtering tool makes this easy - you can segment responses and export them in manageable groups, for example, by periodically exporting submissions based on their submitted date.

If you export data and you’re finding it difficult to do due to file sizes and time out limits, Delib can assist - you can contact our support inbox (support@delib.net) for assistance.

  • Avoid file uploads: Don’t use file uploads at all, or, if you must, use them sparingly - maybe one or two for the entire activity as a large number of people uploading files at the same time can put pressure on the server and cause issues on your site.
  • Limit embedded content: Limit such things like large embedded images, videos, maps, and downloadable documents. If these are needed, host them elsewhere and link to them from Citizen Space instead.
  • Consider your use of skip logic: Try and avoid a wildly complicated skip logic set up with many pages.
  • Test the activity: Before publishing, test the activity (ideally with colleagues) to make sure it is built correctly and works well across different devices.