Performance Tuning Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 and NAV 2013
We recently discovered that a single property on the Service Tier for Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 RTC and Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 has a bigger impact on performance than almost anything else we have done to date in performance tuning Microsoft Dynamics NAV in a 3-Tier environment. The setting that every client and partner should review is the MetadataProviderCacheSize for each Service Tier or Navision Application Server (NAS), which is set to 150 by default. What this means is that the NAS only caches 150 objects of the roughly 4,000 objects plus in a Microsoft Dynamics NAV database. The default setting is not much of an issue if the users who are accessing a particular NAS are all doing the same thing, which does not require caching more than 150 objects. However as soon as multiple departments or functions are accessing the same NAS then the NAS needs to continuously retrieve the objects from the database, which causes a significant degradation in performance.
Our recommendation is to set the MetadataProviderCacheSize to 5,000, which is more objects than exist in a typical Microsoft Dynamics NAV database and ensures that short of restarting a NAS that all objects are retrieved only once. We have seen significant performance improvements in our clients’ environments where they were experiencing performance issues by doing nothing more than increasing this property. I would encourage everyone to increase this setting whether or not you are experiencing performance issues since there is almost no reason not to and the benefits are tremendous the more people are accessing a particular NAS running different types of processes.
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