Enterprise Scalability and Performance with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0

As promised in my earlier post, here are some notes I wrote down during Convergence 2008 EMEA. In my opinion, the best session was “Enterprise Scalability and Performance with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0” held by Amir Jafri. Not so much because of the original agenda and slides, but mostly thanks to all the questions and comments from the audience. Here goes:

Database

• SQL Server is where performance tuning gives the most “bang for the buck”
• Creating custom indexes is supported and encouraged
• Custom search attributes for entity Quick Find view do not automatically get indexes
• Database index should be moved to a different disk system
• Old customization versions are stored in the database
  • Performing many customization changes will slow the system down over time
  • Data is not and cannot be utilized in the UI, so what’s the purpose?
  • There are workarounds for cleaning the old data
• Performance comparison of out-of-the-box setups between v3.0 and v4.0 on identical hardware show 50% reduction in CPU utilization and disk queue length
• SQL Server 2008 will provide performance improvements for CRM out of the box

IIS

• Disabling authentication from static content has been done in v4.0, heavily recommended for also v3.0
• 401 error page size has been reduced, should be done manually for v3.0
• v4.0 uses content compression to reduce the amount of data transferred
  • Compression can create an overhead on the client when rendering content
• Image Strips(?) are used in v4.0 to reduce round trips
• CRM default home page (my activities) round trips have been reduced by 50% between v3.0 and v4.0

Workflow

• Common client for Windows Workflow Foundation is being developed
  • May ship with CRM v.Next
• Workflows are still a heavy operation even in v4.0
• Workflow performance measurement is almost impossible, due to the unlimited number of variations how workflows can be built
• Workflow queue database table is not automatically purged of old data or indexed, should be done manually
  • Table size can grow to become so big that maintenance cannot be run, hotfix is available

Performance general notes

• Tests done using Cisco WAAS application accelerator in WAN environment have proved to improve performance by up to 50%
• Official toolkits for measuring the performance of an existing CRM implementation do not exist
  • Performance measurement toolkit can be used only with test data, prior to live environment deployment
• New MOM (a.k.a. Systems Center) pack for CRM v4.0 will include CRM specific performance analysis tools
• Outlook client improvements in v4.0:
  • Reduced memory footprint, but still quite resource intensive, also due to new requirements from Vista and Office 2007
  • CRM client start-up should no longer slow down the email data transfer upon Outlook start-up, client loads in the background