AX 2012 R2 General Slow performance. Appreciate some help

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Posted on by thebigal_au

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Hello everyone, I am a newbie to this community.

I’m hoping to get some help for AX 2012 performance issues. 12 months ago we upgraded to AX 2012 R2. The upgrade went reasonable well other than AX general performance which was very slow, much slower than our previous AX. Our old AX was very responsive and had a quarter of the system resources that our new AX servers do. What was slow exactly? All general usage, flicking between any screen or menu option always has a 5 to 10 second delay. Even as simple as selecting all vendors ( has a 10 second delay and AX processing balloon often appears ) then if I select a vendor it will take another 10 seconds whilst it opens that vendor information. The same applies everywhere with AX 2012 other then the initial login which now takes roughly 25 to 30 seconds per staff member. It’s just far to slow and sluggish, and our network is generally fast and responsive for all other applications.

To try and eliminate these issues we split AX now with 1 dedicated SQL2012 Server with 8 CPU’s and 70 GB of RAM ( 60 for SQL 10 for OS ) and 1 dedicated AOS Live server with 8 Cpus and 40 GB RAM. But the added specs made no difference.

We have also deployed all the recent hotfixes to all servers and client machines running kernel version 6.2.1000.9323 and application version 6.2.1000.1437 ( not sure why kernel and application version are different ). This only provided some stability improvements and very minor performance difference.

I have asked our support partner and developer to get involved, but they have not been able to provide any improvement. They have turned off some logging and made some minor changes to SQL but that’s it. I'm not sure if that's just the way the product is and why they haven't been successful. They were also quite reluctant to install hotfixes. maybe because they hadn't properly tested them.

On a daily basis our helpdesk receives lots of calls from staff complaining that AX 2012 is just too slow, and when staff are handling customer calls they find the constant 5 to 10 second delays so frustrating.

Our network is now really good. Network traffic is low, and surprisingly the AX server’s utilisation is usually between 10 to 20% even when AX is painfully slow. AX is running on Windows 2012 Servers ( VMWare Virtual Servers highly specked ). Our staff all have brand new HP Elite desk 800 G1 desktops, with Win 7 64 bit / 8 GB RAM, patched to very latest. We use Citrix XenApp 7.5 to deliver the applications to staff which is on very latest patches and fixes.

My question to the community is AX 2012 R2 just slow, or is it likely that something is wrong with how our AX environment is configured. From a networking perspective I can’t see anything further that I can do, I have thrown a lot of resources at the server, I have moved all other virtual servers to other physical hosts, I have the AX server running from a SAN with 15k disks and low utilisation. I have tweaked windows settings, but not getting any major improvement.

I would greatly appreciate if others in this community can let me know if they have experienced general slow performance issues with AX2012 and if they were able to resolve ( and if so how? ), or if it’s just the way AX was configured by our support partner.

Thanks in advance.

Alan

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Chandu Naresh 982 on at

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As I understand you have many user accessing rich client. In your case I would suggest you to use Cluster Configuration and create multiple AOS servers.

Try with 2 AOS servers to start with and if this improves add more servers to AOS.

This will definitely solve your issue.

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Guy Terry 28,924 Moderator on at

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Is performance the same when you run the AX client directly on the AOS?

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thebigal_au 170 on at

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That's a great point. Yes it's exactly the same. Even this morning I jumped on to test this. As its the weekend there were no active users so it should be fast. Directly on the AX Live server it was still the same. About 25 seconds to login, and a 5 to 10 second pause between every screen. Thanks

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thebigal_au 170 on at

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Hi Chandu. Thanks for your reply. We only actually have about 40 active AX users. So I would have thought 1 AX and 1 SQL server would have been enough.. Its interesting that most times AX is slow that the memory and CPU usage on the server is below 20%. Thanks

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Community Member on at

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Please check the accessibility of the cache files in the user profiles. We found some issues when the *.auc files are in a redirected directory or even in synchronized offline folders.

The next thing to proove are security scanners. May be it is necessary to define excludes for client or server side AX components.

On database side, are there any db locks or other waiting resource entries in the activity monitoring tool?

Regards, Hans-Peter

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Guy Terry 28,924 Moderator on at

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Hi thebigal_au

I've seen long client start up times caused by the user having an enormous number of Alerts in their Notification list. That doesn't affect all users though. Have you seen this blog post? It provides an excellent starting point, and links to many other useful resources which will give you plenty to think about:

blogs.msdn.com/.../managing-general-performance-issues-in-microsoft-dynamics-ax.aspx

Check the power saver setting:

blogs.msdn.com/.../dynamics-ax-power-options.aspx

You might find the Day in the Life Benchmark interesting. From memory it shows the performance possible in a ten AOS system with an extremely tough usage profile. (Or, it might just really depress you!)

technet.microsoft.com/.../hh500191.aspx

To answer your query about versions. Your application is at CU6, but you have a much more recent kernel installed. This arrangement is supported by Microsoft. There is a CU7 available for R2, which would provide more application improvements, but I don't expect it would give you a system wide performance increase. CU7 contains the only hotfixes you could really expect to install right now. If you have modified AX, there is some integration effort but helpfully, R2 CU7 was the first CU that included functionality that will attempt to do the integration itself (described as 'automatically merging code changes' here blogs.msdn.com/.../cumulative-update-7-content-now-available-for-microsoft-dynamics-ax-2012-r2.aspx )

Do keep us updated how you get on!

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thebigal_au 170 on at

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Thank you. All staff have parts of their user folder such as my docs, my pictures their user profiles redirected to the fileserver. However their application data directories get stored on each Citrix server as they login. It was like this with AX 4 as well and performance was fine. The only difference now is we see a large build up of auc and kti files for each person. usually on \\citrix\user\app data\local. We have been advised to clear these out regularly.

We have removed anti virus of the 2 AX servers altogether. Just to make sure that wasn't to blame.

How exactly do I check if there are DB locks or any waiting resources.

Thank you again for your reply, it really helps

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thebigal_au 170 on at

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Thank you Guy Terry, There's some really helpful information there. ill have a look at the links you have supplied in detail. ill also ask our AX developers if we should look to implement CU7. Its good to know that the kernel and application layers are different even though supported.

Thanks again

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Community Member on at

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Hi

You will find the Activity Monitor in SQL Server Management Studio by pressing ctrl & alt & A

Hans-Peter

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Denis Macchinetti 16,444 on at

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Hi Alan

First of all, it's normal that the first time that a form is opened, it take some time.

The client and AOS cache is updated ( also SQL ), so the second time is for sure more fast.

So, stop AOS or SQL only for maintenance tasks.

About the waiting time related the AX opening, could be two reasons :

1- Check if there are customizations on the startup AX classes

2- Stop AOSs, backup the SQL tables SysServerSessions and SysClientSessions, delete all records from the above tables, Start Aos

On SysClientSessions table, AX store all the Inactive sessions that are most likely the result of a crash or termination of AX Client.

These records impact also on Licenses and on Aos startup time

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