How long does building the cross reference take in AX 2012 R2?

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How long does building the cross reference take you in your AX 2012 R2 environment? I'm trying to get some metrics to compare against because my virtual machine is running slowly.

I have a machine with 8 cores and 8gb of memory and it's been running for 5 days now...

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Tommy Skaue Moderator on at

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RE: How long does building the cross reference take in AX 2012 R2?

Not sure. I didn't time it last time, but it definitely didn't take 5 days. Something must be off in your system. :-)

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Paul Heisterkamp 1,155 on at

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RE: How long does building the cross reference take in AX 2012 R2?

Environemnt is a single sever with 2 virtual cores and 10gb of memory hosted as a hyper-v VM.

11 hours 38 minutes 23 seconds

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Florian Hopfner 2,460 on at

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RE: How long does building the cross reference take in AX 2012 R2?

4 cores, 12 GB RAM, virtual machine: 10 hours 40 minutes 22 seconds

In other words: Too long, that is why I created a suggestion on connect regarding this: Improve performance of update of cross-references. Could use some more votes, though ;)

But I agree with Tommy Skaue, 5 days is definitely too long even for xRef-Update.

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Malcolm Burtt 1,475 on at

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RE: How long does building the cross reference take in AX 2012 R2?

We had a problem with the cross reference that we reported to support where it actually never finished.

While support were looking at it I took matters into my own hands and hacked the cross reference code to parallelise it. I broke it down so that I had separate threads running with one thread for each of the main AOT nodes (e.g. one doing Tables, one for Classes, etc). I run this in about 12 hours but this is on a fairly heavily customised system so there is quite a bit more code than a standard install. I also have SQL separated from the AOS and, if I understand things correctly, this actually slows down the cross reference update because of the high volume of database round trips that it generates.

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Florian Hopfner 2,460 on at

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RE: How long does building the cross reference take in AX 2012 R2?

I tried a similar approach using batch jobs (one task for each AOT node), but it kept running into update conflicts. Would love to take a look at your solution, if your are willing to share.

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Community Member on at

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RE: How long does building the cross reference take in AX 2012 R2?

Thanks for the answers! So it sounds like 10-12'ish hours is usual. I forgot to mention my cross-reference is on a vanilla AX2012 R2 build as well. It's still running and I can see from the progress bar in 24 hours it's moved from the Forms\E* to Forms\H* and I'm being told they're performing optimally :P

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Malcolm Burtt 1,475 on at

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RE: How long does building the cross reference take in AX 2012 R2?

Yes, I had that problem...and I thought I had solved it but I just checked and I can see that its back again. I will have another bash and get back to you.

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Malcolm Burtt 1,475 on at

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RE: How long does building the cross reference take in AX 2012 R2?

Having refreshed my memory I've worked out what I did to get around the update conflicts.

The problem is caused because AX expects there to be only one xref update running at any one time (who would be mad enough to try running more, right?). As its running it keeps track of its progress by writing the current AOT path being processed to the table XrefDialogUpdate and the progress bar periodically reads from here so that it can show the user how far it has got.This table only ever has one record in it when the xref is running so if you try and run multiple threads they all compete to write to this table (see method xRefUpdate.updatePath()).

What I did was to hobble the process so that it only writes to this table once at the beginning of the process and then I added an extra process to delete the record when all of the cross references have been updated.

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Florian Hopfner 2,460 on at

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RE: How long does building the cross reference take in AX 2012 R2?

Thanks for sharing, I finally got around to implement and test it. Good new first, it did improve the time to update cross references from about 11 hours to 5,5 hours. Checking the three longest running items (classes, forms and the data dictionary) I noticed that their times actually have gone up, with classes being the frontrunner with 5,5 hours (up from about 3 hours). Seems that parallel execution at least of these heavy weight nodes of the AOT does not agree with the xref update algorithm. So there is probably room for improvement, but for now, I take a 50 % improvement any day.

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ThomasWilke 766 on at

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RE: How long does building the cross reference take in AX 2012 R2?

Hi all,

can u just give a hint on how to modify the xRefDialogUpdate handling to not run into the process conflicts?

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