At Alba Spectrum, we specialize in Dynamics GP Customizations. Large part of our customizations are developed in Dexterity. Few weeks ago we ran into an interesting performance issue with a GP 2015 customization we developed for one of our clients.

The customization included a new window and a custom report (created using GP Report Writer). It was deployed and tested in client's staging environment. For the most part it worked fine both inside GP Desktop and on the Web Client.

However, we noticed that when there were more than one user generating the report system performance would degrade upto a point where CPU Utilization would go to 100% and little later GP 2015 Session Host would crash.

Figure 1: Task Manager showing 100% CPU Utilization on GP 2015 Web Session Host

Figure 2: Resource Monitor with Process, Services and CPU Utilization on GP 2015 Web Session Host

We initially thought the problem was in our customization, and started profiling SQL Server and checking the SQL queries. However no signs of performance bottlenecks or blocked transactions were detected on SQL Server.

What also made the investigation challenging was the fact that all standard GP reports were pulling up fine when accessed by multiple users. Furthermore GP users running our customization from GP Desktop client reported no issues. 

In light of this, we focused our attention back to GP 2015 Web Session Host Server that was showing the performance issues. When we looked at the Dynamics.set file, we noticed that all the standard GP dictionaries were located on the local drive while our customization dictionary was sitting on a network shared drive. We copied the dictionary back to local drive and updated the Dynamics.set file accordingly.

We then stress tested the customization with upto 10 users simultaneously running the customization and generating reports, and no performance issues were reported. The reports actually ran faster this time compared to earlier testing with single user.

Figure 3: Task Manager showing CPU Utilization when using dictionaries from local drive

In conclusion when deploying GP 2015 Web Client, make sure to have all the dictionaries residing on local drive on the Web Session Host. You can still have a network shared drive for dictionaries used by the GP Desktop clients for maintenance and upgrade reasons.