Making Dynamics CRM faster

Microsoft has been making Dynamics CRM 2015 faster in several ways and in both deployment options. Nonetheless, you might not be aware of how this is done. To give you a better idea, I discuss both deployments shortly and give you a tip on how you can improve the speed for an upgraded CRM 2015 on premises.

CRM Online

In Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online 2015 Update 1 (v7.1), a new form renderer was built to provide better performance. You might have noticed it when you open up an account or contact, two loading screen flash by (“requesting data from CRM” and “loading business logic”) just before your record is loaded.

This due to the new form rendering engine. Whereas the load time would exponentially go up with the amount of fields you have on your form, the new rendering engine parallelized as many operations as possible and caches more content (e.g. Iframes are now kept throughout the user session). Resulting in shorter loading times whether you have 50 or 300 fields on the form.

Your CRM organization will employ this new rendering engine after the CRM 2015 Update. If you have heavy customizations on your current form, which result in the forms not behaving as intended, you can switch of the new rendering engine to diagnose the problem. Or otherwise around, if your organization is updated but is not using the new engine, I suggest you switch it on by going to the “system settings” – “general” – use legacy form rendering.

If you want to read more about the technical background, I suggest you check out his post: “Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online 2015 Update 1 – New Form Rendering Engine“.

CRM on premises

When you are running Dynamics CRM on premises, the speed of your CRM environment depends mainly on the resources it gets from your IT infrastructure. Nonetheless, you can improve the CRM query performance on an SQL 2014 by changing the SQL’s compatibility level, if you have just upgraded your CRM. This was mentioned earlier by SUDHIR NORY in the article “Improve CRM query performance using compatibility version 120 with SQL 2014“, so all credits to him.

At its core, you need to change the compatibility level from the database from SQL server 2008 (100) to SQL server 2014 (120).

Reason for the improvement is the redesigned cardinality estimator in SQL 2014.

If you want to read more about the technical background, I suggest you check out his post.