AX2012 memory leak – hotfix available

During an implementation we encountered issues where the AOS of AX2012 (CU3) was consuming a lot of memory. At first we thought the machines needed more memory. The extra memory was consumed as well and no memory was released. Not even when user logged out of the system. Investigation was very frustrating…

Only with a restart of the AOS the memory was released again. By accident we found out that during validation and posting of large general journals the memory was rapidly growing. When the posting job finished only half of the memory was released. So we put effort on posting more large journals and see what happened. The conclusion was clear. This must be the source, but we didn’t know if it was caused by customizations, add-on or standard AX. The only hotfix or knowledge base article on memory consumption was included in CU3, so Partnersource could not help us.

When talking with other people I noticed that more customers are having this issue, but were also clueless. These installations did not have the add-ons or customization this customer was using.

With the help of Microsoft Support we got a kernel hotfix to install. We got the link to the download and did some new tests. It appeared to be the solution! The hotfix was already released and known on Partnersource, but the description on KB2800904 is:

“Lost focus when using arrow keys to correct entry in “name” field of vendor list”

Well… this title did not trigger us to ask for this hotfix, or is my English so bad?  So if you encounter problems on the AOS where memory use is growing and leads to an instable system, my advice is to check your Kernel version of the AOS and clients. If the version is lower than 6.0.1108.3529 consider installing this hotfix on AOS and clients. Be sure that you first test in a separate environment and be sure backups are made and available.

Good luck!