Performance Issues Dynamics AX 2012 R2

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Posted on by Bas den Boer

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Hi,

We are a small business using Dynamics AX with no more then 10 users. We are running Dynamics AX 2012 R2 but it is very slow.

We have a clusterd hyper-v enviroment witch contain a VM for Small Business Server 2011, Remote Desktop Server (Windows 2008). AOS Server (Windows 2012). SQL Server 2012 (Windows 2012). We do this on two node cluster with dual E5-2630 processors per node. We have 96 memory per node and two drive groups of 4 Intel SSD drives. All VM`s are Raid 10. There are two VM`s on each drive group.

AOS has 12GB of Memory and SQL 20GB of Memory.

The overal perfomance of the entire network is great. No problem with any apllication except AX.

Our AX partner says that the Hyper-V / Cluster is unsupported by microsoft and even if we want Microsoft to look at then they won`t because it`s unsupported.

We did some testing with on the servers with Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL) and we see some errors of ax32serve.exe with a possible memory leak.

Does anybody runs AX succesfully on a Hyper-V cluster or is our hardware to weak or do we have to focus on the memory leak or maybe disk performance?

I`m very intrested in what you are using for hardware and if you are running on hyper-v or not.

Thanks,

Bas den Boer

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Denis Macchinetti 16,444 on at

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Hi Bas

Your AX sizing is very good for 10 Users.

I have some customers with an Hyper-V cluster, but don't face this issues.

What is the current Cumulative Update?

I suggest you to apply the last kernel build. Have a look at blogs.msdn.com/.../overview-of-ax-build-numbers.aspx

With the last Kernel Microsoft have fixed many AOS crash issues and memory leak.

About Disk Performance, you have SSD disks so I don't think you faced Latency issues.

If the problem persist you have to catch the AOS memory dump and analyze yourself or send to Microsoft.

Finally, which are the business processes that you face very slow ?

You can give me some examples?

Regards

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Martin Dráb 237,795 Most Valuable Professional on at

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You should concentrate on measuring of what is slow. For example, if you have a problem cause by extensive locking in database or by fragmented indexes, it doesn't make sense to concentrate on hardware. Or you see, for example, that you always have a plenty of free memory but long I/O queues. You can't solve the problem unless you find it.

By the way, you might be interested in Hyper-V Benchmark for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012.

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Bas den Boer 485 on at

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Hi,

Thanks for your answer.

We now have Cumulative Update 6 and our AX partner told us that we couldn`t just update to Update 7. In your list i see also two other updates should they also be installed?

AOS memory dump? What is it and how can i catch it?. I only know Windows memory dumps after a BSOD.

As for the bussines processes i will ask my colleague.for examples.

Regards,

Bas den Boer

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Martin Dráb 237,795 Most Valuable Professional on at

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You can right-click a process in Task Manager and choose "Create dump file". But if you still have free memory, your performance problem is likely somewhere else.

You can install kernel hotfixes without issues. If you wanted to update the application as well, you would have to upgrade your modifications (nevertheless there some nice features in CU7...).

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Denis Macchinetti 16,444 on at

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Hi Bas

Additionally, you can open a MS case and ask for the last Kernel Cumulative Update available, so more recent than 6.2.1000.6089

Regards

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Community Member on at

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Finding someone who knows their way around the AX trace parser and SQL indexing would probably help you out a bit.

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Tommy Skaue Moderator on at

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It is helpful to understand what exactly is running slow. I mean, opening the client can be super quick, but then it might start to load a role center from SharePoint and this is causing a observable delay. Likewise, opening a parameter form may take less than a second, while opening a grid of customers may take longer due to various of reasons.

It is possible to optimize queries and look for data that should better be pulled from table cache, so using trace parser to investigate database hits is something every developer should spend time on.

One thing that most IT pros forget is setting Power Options to High Performance. By default it is set to Balanced which is not optimal for performance.

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Bas den Boer 485 on at

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Hi All,

Thanks again for all your answers.

Accounting is very slow, it takes approx 7-9 seconds to generate an invoice from a packing slip and print the invoice before we can continue.

Opening a sales order with over 10 lines takes multiple seconds, after opening the screen it`s blinking a few times (loading) before we can continue.

Should we focus on faster hardware or SQL not virtualised and out of the cluster?

Would AX trace parser and SQL indexing help us? and should our AX partner knows how to?

Should we first update the latest patches?

If we and our AX partner aren`t able to solve this performance problem then where do we start? Do we call Microsoft or another AX (dutch) partner? I don`t know if that is possible because it is written by our AX partner.

Sorry for all the question but we are getting a little bit (7 bytes) desperate

Regards,

Bas den Boer

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Denis Macchinetti 16,444 on at

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Hi Bas

For sure, you have to install the last Kernel available.

Also, I suggest you to install CU7 application.

Microsoft with CU7 have fixed many bug.

The effort depend from how many personalizations are been made and in which area.

With the above actions I'm pretty sure that you solve the Crash issues.

About performance, "7-9 seconds to generate an invoice from a packing slip and print the invoice" could be fine.. how many lines has been processed?

Also, you connect to AX using rich client installed on the users workstations or on Terminal Server?

Finally, the performance problems often are linked to some Customizations.

The best tool to analyze is Windows Performance Monitor.

On the link below you can find the guide for how to collect AX 2012 event traces with Windows Performance Monitor.

Then, you can send to Microsoft or analyze your self with Trace Parser.

Last but not the last, is mandatory schedule the Database maintenance ( Indexs and Statistics).

Have a look also to blogs.msdn.com/.../top-10-issues-discovered-from-premier-field-engineer-dynamics-ax-health-check.aspx

Top 10 issues discovered from Dynamics AX Health Check

About Reporting, blogs.msdn.com/.../microsoft-dynamics-ax-2012-reporting-tips-how-to-improve-performance.aspx

Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Reporting - tips how to improve performance

About SQL Server 2012, have a look at blogs.msdn.com/.../drip-drip-drip-time-to-patch-sql-2012-sp1.aspx

About customizations, have a look at blogs.msdn.com/.../top-10-issues-discovered-in-the-dynamics-ax-code-review.aspx

Regards

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Tommy Skaue Moderator on at

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The generation of invoice would invoke SSRS, which could potentially slow down the process. If that is the case, you could make use of the new "warm-up" feature added in CU7 (technet.microsoft.com/.../dn527683.aspx). SSRS also needs adequate free system memory in order to perform satisfactory.

You mention the screen is blinking. Can you verify the connectivity is satisfactory. Recommended bandwidth between client and server is no less than 100MB/s. There are other optimizations you may want to test out. Read more about these here: blogs.msdn.com/.../ax2012-client-performance-options.aspx

AX Trace parser will tell the developer what part of the business logic spends the most time processing, and if there are any long running queries or queries that potensially should be rather bypass the SQL Server and be fetched directly from cache instead.

Always investigate any performance improvements in latest updates. The new Issue Search in Life Cycle Services may reveal recent updates that contains performance improvements.

You may argue the partner should know how to solve this, but AX is a huge topic so I'm not surprised if some quirks require them to either contact Microsoft for help or search for any published content from blogs or technical articles/whitepapers.

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