Microsoft Crm Dallas... information
I have a customer who is deploying Microsoft CRM 3.0 in offices in North America and
Europe. At the moment the server is based in Montreal, Canada (HQ of company)
while phase 1 client deployment is in Europe.
Performance is a major issue with this set-up. Opening a new list view or a
new form takes anything from 3 seconds (just acceptable) to 7 seconds
(unuseable) to even 15 seconds. This is with both the online Outlook client
and with the web client – there appears to be no speed difference between the
two.
The obvious suspicion is WAN latency, but sometimes we get 3 second opening
times even though latency never really drops below 100ms between clients and
servers. Also, even local LAN connections with clients in Montreal seem to
have some variance in speed.
Questions:
Do other people have CRM working over a WAN, and if so, what performance do
they see? Are these results typical?
Any suggestions on how to improve performance? Is there back-end tuning that
can help?
If it’s not latency, what other factors should they consider?
They are considering some options already, such as Terminal Server (but that
means you can’t use it offline), moving the server to Europe (improves
latency for the majority of users, who are in Europe, but makes things worse
for the North American users of course), or Application Acceleration devices
(probably too expensive).
Set-up is as follows:
CRM server 3.0 and SQL Reporting Services are running on a Dual Xeon 2GHz
machine with 1Gb RAM, Windows Server 2003.
SQL server 2000 is running on a Dual Xeon 2.4GHz with 1Gb RAM, also running
Windows Server 2003. There are some other small databases on this box, but
they have practically zero activity.
Both servers are in Montreal, Canada.
A typical client machine is a Pentium M 1.6GHz laptop with 512Mb RAM,
Windows XP, Office 2003, IE 6, based in London or in The Hague.
Average ping times between offices in the same Continent (e.g. London and
the Hague, or Montreal and Dallas) are 50ms. Average pings across the
Atlantic are 130ms. European offices usually have a 4Mb/s SDSL line and
Montreal has a 10 mb fiber link to the internet. Traffic between the offices
goes over a VPN.
Any advices ?
I have one word for you: memory.
512 on the client is I believe the minimum spec, but you really should
have 1GB RAM on the clients for much improved performance.
Also, 1 GB on the server is fine if you're in an SBS environment with
LAN users, but I would definitely increase that to 2 or ideally 4 GB on
the server.
Finally, are your CRM and SQL servers tightly connected (not through
multiple routers and hops) with at least 100MB, ideally 1GB?
I deployed CRM to servers in seattle and had them being accessed from India
and also the UK. Performance was never an issue ie around 3 seconds max. Can
you have the remote users access another company web site to see if they see
latency problems