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Microsoft Dynamics AX (Archived)

Bottomline Create!Forms (Precision!Form)

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We are running AX 2012 R2 and using the Bottomline Create!Forms bolt-on, now Precision!Forms, for the creation of our documents. Our Create!Form server is running on a Hyper-V VM 2008 R2 Standard server. The CF server has 15 processors and 32 GB of RAM assigned to it, so it is a beefy system. Currently nothing else resides on the host server. The server is on a 10G switch so traffic is pretty fast on the server and I'm able to move data back and forth pretty quick. 

The issue we are seeing is that when we display a document to the screen it is quite slow to display on the screen. It is taking anywhere from 4 to 8 seconds to show up. We tried running it from the CF server itself, and it shows up in under 2 seconds consistently. Occasionally, it will show up in under 2 seconds on a client machine, or even one of the AOS servers, but consistently it is the 4 to 8 seconds. When we run the document from a client machine and monitor the CF server at the time time we do see the PDF show up almost instantly in the shared folder, but it is just taking time to get to the client.  

We have tried turning off some of the customization's with the director script and removing logos, but still haven't seen any improvement in time. We have also tried adjusting some settings on the relating to SR-IOV and VM-Q, but still haven't seen an improvement in regards to Create!Forms. We did see some improvement in network copies after changing VM-Q, but nothing for Create!Forms. 

Has anyone else seen similar issues relating to Create!Forms with displaying to screen, and if so, what did you do to improve it? Any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you. 

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  • Community Member Profile Picture
    on at

    Sorry one more note. The CF server is running on SSD's so it isn't a disc issue with it having to spin up.

  • Tim Schofield Profile Picture
    on at

    Yup - we saw that 'slow to display on the screen' behaviour. I think you'll find it relates to the way Create!Form displays a report on the screen. The print XML is sent to Create!Form,  and in parallel AX waits for a PDF to be formatted and placed in a temporary directory. It's that PDF that's picked up and displayed to the user. Hope this helps (and isn't wildly out of date, it's been a while since we used Create!Form).

  • Verified answer
    Community Member Profile Picture
    on at

    Ok, I think we figured out the issue.  It ended up being a Server 2008 R2 SMB2 file share caching issue.  Long story short, we did a wireshark on the client workstation, and whenever the AX client would query the server for the CreateForms created PDF, behind the scenes, it would first return that it wasn’t found, even though the file was in fact on the server(in the ‘preview’ share).  For some reason, in Server 2008 R2, the SMB2 file share cache takes several seconds to update for a Windows client, thus adding an extra 5-7 seconds to the total retrieval time for the CreateForms PDF file.  

    Essentially, I had to disable the SMB2 protocol on the CreateForms server to fix the issue for all of the clients.  They now use the SMB1 protocol to retrieve the document, which doesn’t experience the same cache delay as SMB2.  Now, whenever anyone brings up a createforms document, it now takes around 1-2 seconds instead of the 5-7 seconds as it was before.

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