Are custom Dedupe General rules working for anyone?

Question

On CiviCRM 4.7.8/Joomla 3.5.1, I've experimented with variety and can't seem to get this to work. The preset reserved rules, import, inclusive in contact record and main dedupe rules are all working. If I create a new General Rule with just Email set for 10 characters with a weight of 10 and a Threshold of 10 on a group of 10, 50 and 100 contacts in a group with both known and no dupes. Running this rule just runs and runs without any results whether or not the frontend times out to 500 error.

The default Reserved Rules run lickety-split. Please advise.

Answer 1

It sounds like you might be running the dedupe on a large database with slow MySQL performance; I've certainly seen this before. The database doesn't even have to be that big; I've seen this on databases with as few as 20,000 contacts.

The pre-set dedupes that can't be edited use a fundamentally different approach to deduping that runs MUCH faster, but it must be hard-coded.

There's an unpublished extension from Veda (see item 1 here; most subsequent items are part of Civi 4.7) that adds a framework for more hard-coded dedupes, along with a large number of extra pre-built dedupes. That may be better for your situation. I'm not sure it's tested on Civi 4.7 though, so try it on a copy of your database first!