Hi,
We are analysing on decommissioning the Production servers but also wanted to check here for any pointers/tips to consider if we want to reduce the number of AEM Publisher and dispatcher servers in Production if someone has already worked on this before?
For ex: Out of 4 Publishers and 4 dispatchers, if we would want to reduce to 2 each as most of the sites are migrated to a different tool and we are just left with 8 out of 21 sites.
Thank you
Hi @shibani06,
If you are planning to reduce the number of Publishers and Dispatchers in Production, there are a few important points to consider before scaling down:
Traffic & Load Analysis
Check your traffic patterns (page views, concurrent users, API calls) for the remaining 8 sites.
Run load tests on 2 publishers + 2 dispatchers to confirm they can handle peak loads comfortably.
Redundancy & HA
Moving from 4 → 2 publishers/dispatchers reduces fault tolerance. If one node goes down, you’ll only have 1 left.
Ensure your load balancer health checks and failover strategy are solid.
Content Publishing & Replication
Reconfigure Author replication agents to point to the new publisher list.
Check replication queue throughput during bulk publishes—2 publishers need to handle all traffic flushes now.
Dispatcher Configuration
Update your load balancer config when reducing dispatchers.
Validate cache hit ratio and invalidation rules to avoid bottlenecks.
Warm up cache after scale-down to reduce first-hit latency.
Monitoring & Alerts
Put strong monitoring in place for CPU, memory, GC, replication queues, and dispatcher cache health.
This is critical because fewer nodes mean less buffer if something spikes.
Disaster Recovery / Rollback Plan
Keep automation (CloudFormation, Ansible, etc.) ready so you can quickly scale back to 4 if needed.
Test the rollback before cutting servers.
License & Cost
Verify with Adobe if your license terms are per-core/instance and whether reducing infra affects compliance.
In short: Yes, you can scale down to 2 publishers + 2 dispatchers if your remaining 8 sites have much lower load. Just make sure you validate with load testing, have strong monitoring, and keep a fallback plan.
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