Surviving AX 2012

(0) Share

Report

Posted on by Brandon Wiese

17,788

This is not a technical post, nor a rant either though it may come across like one.

Is anyone else feeling like they're just trying to survive AX 2012 hoping that 2015 will go somehow earn back to the glory of 4.0 and 2009?

Performance is terrible. This is measurable, and has been measured and reported in blogs, but really all one has to do is spend an hour with AX 4.0 and then immediately follow it with an hour on 2012 doing the same tasks, and it's impossible to come away feeling like 2012 is not incredibly sluggish at virtually everything it does.

2012 R2 brought some relief, and I think there's some hope on the horizon probably with the next major version when the product is fully compiled and P-code goes away, and maybe we'll get a fully namespaced .NET application out of AX like I think the product much eventually grow-up into.

Meanwhile it's hard to argue with anyone that the TCO of AX improved on this last major version. Development takes longer, especially reporting, to do the same tasks and suffers from far more ankle-biting random issues like annoying caches that don't refresh and can't figure out they're invalid on their own. Users enter fewer orders per hour, find it harder to locate needed information, and generally suffer the same performance "death of a thousand cuts" waiting for forms and lists to open and the latest "I'm busy" mouse or spinning cursor to go away.

Am I alone in this feeling? Am I wrong? What are people doing to make this product shine like it deserves but clearly does not out of the box?

*This post is locked for comments

I have the same question (0)

All responses (6)

Answers (0)

PCO 720 on at

Like (0)

Report

Hi,

I sometimes feel the same way.

Performance is really suffering at the price of customization. I think they were trying to mature the product, trying to make it as feature rich as possible directly out-of-the-box.

Unfortunately, doing this, performance had to suffer a bit. But as you also stated, I feel that the next big release will (should!) bring some improvemnt to the performance, and Dynamics Ax will "shine like it deserves".

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
Suggested answer

André Arnaud de Cal... 300,904 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

Like (0)

Report

I do agree slightly.

Always check for the latest fixes. In CU5 for AX2012 there are some performance issues solved.

I think you have to provide feedback to Microsoft when you have an issue. You can enter feedback on Connect. (connect.microsoft.com)

Without reporting feedback the next release can have the same problems... So let's make it a better product together!

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
Brandon Wiese 17,788 on at

Like (0)

Report

We are running AX 2012 R2 already, having determined very quickly after it was released that it provided some much needed performance relief. I keep an eye on hotfixes and CU's for further improvements. For example,

I'm aware of the hotfix to improve compile time from 5-6 hours down to 2-3 hours. I have tested the index change provided by this hotfix in a test environment, and I see this level of improvement. I'm also closely following the ongoing thread where under perfect conditions and select hardware the compile time has been brought down to supposedly around 1 hour. This is tremendous. I can't tell you the endless headache having to create an 8-9 hour window of maintenance for code migration, compile, CIL, and AOS cluster restart has been. Usually it means I burn a Friday night until midnight and get up Saturday morning at 6. We don't yet have any of our 24/7 plants live on AX, and when that happens I'm really not sure what I'm going to do. I have tried to compile while users are in the system, and we have documented cases where they get errors because of it, so I take seriously Microsoft recommendation that compile should occur with no users online.

Having said all that, just the fact that it takes 6 hours is hard to swallow. I understand why technically, the process is pegged on a single processor thread, and so those of us who do this repeatedly can only watch the processor at 6% on a machine with massively underutilized hardware capacity sitting technically idle. Putting the AOS and client on the SQL Server machine helps, and using LOCALHOST in the configuration helps further, but it just adds TCO to the product, plain and simple.

I have been in several AX TAP programs and provided hundreds of bug reports (many with my own accompanying fixes) and feature suggestions, so I'm no stranger to product feedback.

I appreciate your comments. I too would like us all to work together to make AX a better product, as I have been doing for more than a decade now.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
Brandon Wiese 17,788 on at

Like (0)

Report

It wasn't my attention to commiserate publicly. I asked what people are doing, and I'd seriously like to hear what people are doing to deal with what I think is an obvious yet strangely unspoken fact.

I still remember my first AX deployment where I had created the database and test environment as Unicode but deployed the production environment with the "Unicode" checkbox turned off accidentally, invalidating all of the Indexes in SQL Server and grinding the newly live environment nearly to a halt. I secretly hope that I've merely missed the same magic checkbox in 2012 and everything will go back the way it used to be but for this simple oversight.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
ZvikaR 168 on at

Like (0)

Report

I am definitely seeing the same things - mostly issues with performance, and more expensive/time consuming development process.

It is my impression that for larger enterprises this is a price worth paying for the added functionality which is very much fulfilling typically enterprise deployment. Much better EP, data sharing and the new financial dimension framework, to name just few things that were painfully missing in previous versions.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
Mark Chequer 50 on at

Like (0)

Report

This is a concern. I am upgrading from AX4 to AX2012 with the hope that the performance is going to be vastly better. Is this performance drop off a like-for-like. in other words after moving from AX4 to AX2012 and with the same volumes you have this performance?.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No