Understanding & Improving Performance

Practical checks to diagnose slow pages and improve Business Central performance with Bevica.

First published 09/02/2020 by Roberto Stefanetti, he provides a good summary on how to help the system with performance. His original full blog can be seen here: Business Central – How to make it go FAST!

Microsoft published a series of pages on Microsoft Docs dedicated to performance with Business Central, functional consultants and end users in mind. The list below are top tips for making the software run as smoothly as possible.

Scheduled and batch Jobs

• Schedule long running reports to run in background
• Schedule jobs (for example posting) to run in background
• Enable background posting in areas where your business is using reservations and item tracking with serial and lot numbers
• Adjust item costs as a periodic background job (i.e. do not adjust automatically)
• Do not run job queues too frequently

Avoid locking

When the Business Central database needs to have exclusive access to a table or a data row, it will issue a lock. When another session needs to access a locked resource, it needs to wait until the session holding the lock is finished with its work.

Use number series that allow gaps

Number series in Business Central are a shared resource that sometimes cause locking issues. Not all records that you create in Business Central are financial transactions that must use sequential numbering. For all such number series, consider using number series that allow gaps to avoid locking issues. For more information, see Gaps in Number Series.

Be cautious with the Copy company operation

The Copy Company operation is not intended to run while business transactions are being applied to Business Central. Should you need to perform a Copy Company operation, it is highly recommended to do it outside working hours. Do turn off scheduled jobs while performing Copy Company to avoid locking issues.

Personalise your workspace

• Consider personalising your UI for performance (hide non-essential parts on role centre, list, and card pages)
• Use links instead of document attachments to improve performance
• Manage Attachments, Links, and Notes on Cards and Documents
• Faster data entry - use keyboard shortcuts for faster data entry
• Block inactive customers, vendors, or items to improve filtering and searching on document data entry
• Block Items from Sales or Purchasing

Data search

Search in lists searches all columns and rows on that table. To avoid resource starvation on broad data searches the system displays a timeout message: Searching for rows is taking too long. Try to search or filter using different criteria. If you are experiencing this or slowness in data search, we suggest setting a column filter instead.

Dynamics 365 Sales integration

There is a performance overhead involved in enabling integration on an entity such as Customer or Contact that will impact performance. Only enable integration if you intend to integrate with Dynamics 365 Sales, and only do so on the entities that are needed.

Functionality with known performance impact

These areas of the Business Central application can cause a performance impact and require consideration before they are rolled out.

• Security filtering mode
• Inventory Posting
• Dimensions
• Dynamic Order tracking
• Automatic reservation
• Item tracking and Lot/Serial No. Expiration dates
• Change log

Finally, make sure that you do not repeat these performance mistakes that we have seen cause significant performance issues for customers.

• Do not adjust cost item entries with a high frequency.
• Do not run job queues too frequently.
• Do not adjust item costs automatically if you have a lot of item entries (run in the background instead).
• Do not postpone setting up global dimensions, as this can be a heavy operation when you have a lot of data: set up correct global dimensions to avoid changing them later on.
• Do not run the Copy company operation during business hours.
• Make sure you only set Change Log on essential tables and fields.