dynamics CRM performance question

Question

Hello Dynamics CRM gurus :)

My boss asked me to do a research on available CMSes on market because cms we are using currently is rather a mess. For me as a .NET developer it would be great to choose and implement Dynamics CRM because of extensibility and perfect integration with .NET environment and well-known tools.

All marketing blahbla sounds great but I'd like to know about common DISADVANTAGES, ISSUES concerning this system.

The most important is how it is performing in a company with about 150 concurrent and very active users. I heard that is't really slow comparing to competitors system.

Thanks in advance

Best regards,

Tomasz.

Answer 1

I can't answer regarding the number of users/activity. I can refer you to the SDK article 'Performance Best Practices'. I'll speak to the side of you that would be writing plugins (to data access messages), custom pages accessing the CRM web services, and writing SSRS reports. A couple of points I can relate to:

1. Disable Plug-ins. This is an attractive and major integration point into CRM. The fact that they list it as a performance issue is disheartening. We have seen OutOfMemory exceptions stemming from the plugin cache. We got around this issue by deploying to disk rather than database. In the database they reload the assembly and confirm the signature every time a plugin is called. We believe this was eating up the Large Object Heap. Probably not an issue for your normal CRM implementation.

2. Limit Data Retrieved. Definitely. Avoid lookups/picklists/bits you don't need when you can as these cause an extra join. Not going to be a huge deal on smaller entities. But if you need entities with a large number of attributes it could be. Probably not an issue for normal CRM customization. A good design in other cases should avoid this issue.

Answer 2

The Dynamics CRM Product team has published an excellent whitepaper with guidance and benchmarks for 500 concurrent users. You can learn a lot by studying this paper. The link is here:

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Suggested Hardware for Deployments of up to 500 Concurrent Users