Dynamics GP Reminders Make GP Load Very Slowly

This week I have been working with a client who is preparing a new SQL Server in preparation for their Dynamics GP 2010 upgrade.

One strange behavior that he observed is that when he launched Dynamics GP 2010 directly on the SQL Server, it would take over 5 minutes to load.  During that time, the GP window would be blank and have the famous "Not Responding" message in the title bar.

However, when GP was launched on a new Terminal Server, it "only" took about 100 seconds to load.  Since we were troubleshooting other issues with the SQL Server, we thought that the server might be the problem.  But after running SQL Profiler and tracing the Dynamics GP activity during the load process, we discovered that GP was running over 50,000 queries against the database before the application was usable.  Once the queries stopped, GP seemed fine.

We traced the activity when launching GP on the Terminal Server, and the same 50,000 queries were being run, but for some reason it took less than 2 minutes for GP to fully launch on that server.

What originally seemed like a SQL Server issue now seemed to be a GP issue.

Reviewing the queries, we saw that they were against the service contract table, and GP was requesting every single record in that table, one record at a time.  After scratching his head for a while, the client realized that the sa user had a reminder related to service contracts.  Sure enough, after deleting that reminder, GP loaded fine, and loaded quickly.

This issue isn't new, but because the symptoms can vary dramatically from machine to machine, and because reminders for one GP user can be completely different than reminders for another user, it isn't always obvious that reminders are causing the problem.  And when this client's reminder was originally setup, it may have worked fine, but as they added thousands of contracts over the years, it would have gradually caused GP to become slower and slower.

I'm not a fan of the Reminder pop-up window that appears after login anyway, so after seeing how certain reminders can cripple GP, it is just another reason to avoid their general use. 

Steve Endow is a Dynamics GP Certified Trainer and Dynamics GP Certified IT Professional in Los Angeles.  He is also the owner of Precipio Services, which provides Dynamics GP integrations, customizations, and automation solutions.

http://www.precipioservices.com