title: Sitecore EventQueue Table growing out of control
body: <p>We are having an issue with the EventQueue table growing very fast at times, up to 3k records a second, and never clearing records (30 million as of right now). Our environment has the following set up:</p>
  
  <p>Sitecore 7.2</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>4 CD servers and 1 CM server</li>
  <li>All four CD servers are load balanced. </li>
  <li>CD1 and CD2  are pointed to DB1 server CD3 and CD4 are pointed to DB2</li>
  <li>server There are 2 Publishing targets (one for each DB) Merge</li>
  <li>Replication is setup for the Core db across all servers (CM, CD's)</li>
  <li>EventQueue is enabled</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>I have a few questions so I will break them down into separate line items.</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p>When a publish is issued for all CD servers is the updated content sent directly from the CM db to the CD db's (all of the correct tables) or is it sent to the EventQueue table in the CD db and the CD server has a job/task that looks at the table and updates as needed.</p></li>
  <li><p>Depending on answer to the first question, if there are 2 CD servers pointing to the same DB how do they know if they should process the EventQueue table (wont they each process the table and be duplicating efforts)</p></li>
  <li><p>Why isn't the EventTable table cleared? How is is cleared, when is it cleared?</p></li>
  </ol>