Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Performance Issues with Dynamics GP on Terminal Server with Mapped Drives

In the last year, I've had three inquiries regarding extreme performance issues when running Dynamics GP on a Terminal Server.  In the three cases, two were using GP 10, and one was using GP 9.

The customers explain that when some users launch GP on a Terminal Server, it can take 5 to 10 minutes for Dynamics GP to launch.  But other users on the same Terminal Server don't have any issues or delays launching Dynamics GP.  Sometimes a user that has been working fine will suddenly experience the issue, and it will persist for that user going forward.

In all three cases, it seems that the primary culprit was mapped drives on the user's terminal server session. 

Two of the customers found that removing the drive mapping option in the user's Active Directory profile solved the problem.  The third customer did not have drive mappings in the AD profile, but found that removing the login script, which mapped drives, solved the problem.

What is strange is that not all GP users were affected, even if all users had the same drive mappings.  And from what I have learned, only Dynamics GP had performance issues.

Since a ton of customers run Dynamics GP just fine in a Terminal Server environment (presumably many with mapped drives), I assume that there is something else involved other than just mapped drives, but I don't yet have any clues as to what that might be, and why it only affects some users.

Since one of the customers needs mapped drives in user TS sessions, they are planning on submitting a support case to understand why the mapped drives cause the issue.  If I learn more, I'll post an update.

1 comment:

Chris said...

My first guess would be that something like search indexing or offline file sync was running against the mapped drives.