Neil McDonald's Dynamics 365 Blog

I’ve been looking at ways to try to increase the performance of our CRM infrastructure recently. I followed this Technet Optimisation guide some time ago, but thought it was worth a revisit. The tips here were great when I first configured our CRM environment, but that was almost 2 years ago now!

One thing which jumped out at me was the ‘Using Compression Techniques’ section. I remember following this in the past, but the section on ‘Dynamic Compression’ jumped out at me, as I don’t recall following before. It specifically talks about compressing responses sent to SDK clients such as the Outlook client. Standard HTTP compression does not do this, so since a lot of my our users use the Outlook client, I gave it a go.

Both the command line and GUI steps can be found in the Technet article, but here are the IIS 7.5 steps which I followed to enable it: –

1. In Internet Information Services Manager, click the <Server name>, scroll down in the Features View to the Management section, and then start the Configuration Editor.
   
2. In the Configuration Editor, in the Section: address box, type system.webServer/httpCompression, click dynamicTypes, and then in the value cell, click the ellipses . . .
   
   
3. In the Collection Editor, click Add, verify that Enabled is set to True and type application/soap+xml; charset=utf-8  into the mimeType field
   
4. Click one of the Items: collection cells, and then close the Collection Editor
5. In the Configuration Editor, under Actions, click Apply.
   
   
6. Open and command prompt and type IISReset to restart the web server process

After testing that everything was still working as expected, I left it for a few days and then checked our bandwidth usage.

The chart below covers around 30 days of bandwidth from our hosted CRM infrastructure and I made the compression change at around day 16 (the middle of the chart).

Our bandwidth usage has dropped by over 50%! External users have also been telling me how Outlook ‘seems a lot faster’, which is fantastic!

Now, I’m well aware that compression places more burden on the server, but the speed benefits our users are seeing far outweigh the negligible increase in CPU usage.

If you’re trying to increase your CRM infrastructure performance, I can’t recommend reading through the Technet article enough!