About dynamics CRM performance

Question

My boss asked me to do a research on available CMSes on market because cms we are using currently is rather a mess.

For me as a .NET developer it would be great to choose and implement Dynamics CRM because of extensibility and perfect integration with .NET environment and well-known tools.

All marketing sounds great but I'd like to know about common DISADVANTAGES, ISSUES concerning this system.

The most important is how it is performing in a company with about 150 concurrent and very active users. I heard that it's really slow comparing to competitors system.

Answer 1

The Dynamics CRM Product team has published an excellent whitepaper with guidance and benchmarks for 500 concurrent users. You can learn a lot by studying this paper. The link is here:

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Suggested Hardware for Deployments of up to 500 Concurrent Users

Answer 2

I can't answer regarding the number of users/activity. I can refer you to the SDK article 'Performance Best Practices'. I'll speak to the side of you that would be writing plugins (to data access messages), custom pages accessing the CRM web services, and writing SSRS reports. A couple of points I can relate to:

1. Disable Plug-ins. This is an attractive and major integration point into CRM. The fact that they list it as a performance issue is disheartening. We have seen OutOfMemory exceptions stemming from the plugin cache. We got around this issue by deploying to disk rather than database. In the database they reload the assembly and confirm the signature every time a plugin is called. We believe this was eating up the Large Object Heap. Probably not an issue for your normal CRM implementation.

2. Limit Data Retrieved. Definitely. Avoid lookups/picklists/bits you don't need when you can as these cause an extra join. Not going to be a huge deal on smaller entities. But if you need entities with a large number of attributes it could be. Probably not an issue for normal CRM customization. A good design in other cases should avoid this issue.

Answer 3

I can't really offer any advice on how it compares to its leading competitors. I know the main thing is that its cheaper and very actively developed.

I can say a bit about performance though which might help.

We have about 400 - 600 concurrent users using the system. The system isn't particularly web server intensive. We have two for resliency - it would be a disaster if it went offline, but these servers are never taxed. They have a couple of virtual cores and 4 gig of ram.

Our database is 130GB in size and is hosted on a 24 core database server with 48GB of RAM. It is clustered but because SQL server can't handle two active nodes, only one server is ever active.

The database server really never gets maxed out. However, there is one very important change we needed to make and one that I think MS are advising all users of large CRM installs to do now. By default SQL Server has a locking mode that will block people writing to the database when a row is being read. In our system (and numerous others apparently) that was causing huge issues.

We switched on a different mode (I think its called "snapshot isolation") or something like that. To be fair though even if you did have 200 concurrent users, it won't be any issue until the more central tables like activitypointer and account get pretty large (in the millions)

So - there is no doubt that CRM 2011 can handle that many users as long as you have some suitable hardware and have someone who understands SQL Server

HTH

S