Performance Improvements

How to get the best performance on your Microsoft CRM implementation?

There are many things to verify. Better to have a professional with plenty of experience on performance bottlenecks to help you.

A good environment analysis and checking may help identifying problems that are not always easy to spot.

Many things could be related to performance issues in a Microsoft CRM implementation:

- Hardware and software specifications;
- Software editions, versions and patches;
- Configurations, parameters, registry keys, folder structure, etc.
- Customisations (forms and views).
- Workflows.
- Plug-ins.
- Database data distributions across tables and lack of cleaning.
- Wrong database maintenance plans.
- Physical disks structure.
- etc.

One check up of your Microsoft CRM would require verifying different parts of the implementation as follows:

- Client side
. Hardware
. CPU
. Memory
. Software
. Internet Explorer configuration
. Microsoft CRM Outlook Client configuration
. Outlook settings
. User settings
. Registry settings/cleaning
. Analysis of the client trace file

- Network
. Latency
. Servers distribution
. Server roles distribution

- Application server
. Hardware
. CPU
. Memory
. Software
. IIS settings
. Microsoft CRM configuration
. Customisations (forms and views) settings
. Workflows settings
. Plug-ins utilisation
. Registry settings
. Analysis of the CRM trace file
. Analysis of the IIS log file
. Analysis of performance counters

- Reporting server
. Hardware
. CPU
. Memory
. Software
. Reporting services configuration

- E-mail router server
. Hardware
. CPU
. Memory
. Software
. E-mail router configuration
. Exchange settings
. Users' mailbox settings
. E-mail forward rules

- Database server
. Hardware
. CPU
. Memory (Use of AWE directions)
. Software
. SQL server edition/version/settings
. Maintenance plans
. Creation of indexes
. Creation of statistics
. Database cleansing
. Database and log file size configurations and shrinking issues
. Indexing defragmentation
. Historical data archiving
. Analysis of the SQL log
. Analysis of the SQL server profiler
. Use of the SQL tuning advisor
. Analysis of performance counters

- Physical disks
. Defragmentation
. RAID implementation directions
. Distribution of files through different physical disks
. Analysis of performance counters

The ideal is to call someone that can go through your environment and make straight forward suggestions so that you can start improving your system as soon as possible. Some times a quick check and a report of future actions and prioritisation could make you get rid of problems before you would expect.