Learned something new on IIS Compression

Dynamics CRM is a web app, therefore it leverages IIS. Usually IIS compression is enabled by default since we would like to reduce bandwidth usage and also reduce the page load times. The .aspx files sent by the server to the browser is highly compressed by algorithms such as gzip. IIS 7+ offers the ability to cache not only compressed static files, it also compressed dynamic files. Modern browsers have the ability to decompress the incoming files.

IIS Compression uses the CPU to compress the files, I’ve learned that compression is automatically switch OFF when CPU usage is above 90% for Dynamic file and 100% for Static files. It will automatically switch back ON when the CPU drops back to 50% for both Dynamic and Static files. You can modify these limits in the applicationHost.config file which is normally in the C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv\config folder.

I want to bring this to everyone’s attention because usually during CRM performance testing, we often push the server CPUs to their limits. Please look at your CPU usage on your front end servers to make sure that they don’t hit the IIS compression limits and you will have a more accurate performance test.

Manually Apply CRM Update Rollup to Single Tenant

In an enterprise CRM project, you might run into a large number of tenants in an environment since there are multiple teams working on the project. Not all of the teams want to have the patch apply to their tenant due to many reasons… My customer asked me if there’s a way for them to apply the CRM Update Rollup to a single tenant instead of all tenants in an environment.  I am thinking there’s got to be a way since CRM Online applies the patches at the tenant level, so I reach out to my colleagues in PG and Premier and sure there’s a way to do it.

By default, when you install a CRM Update Rollup, it will automatically applies the update to all of the tenants (include database updates). If you want to disable the automatic database update, please execute the following PowerShell script.

add-pssnapin Microsoft.Crm.Powershell 

$itemSetting = new-object 'System.Collections.Generic.KeyValuePair[String,Object]'("AutomaticallyInstallDatabaseUpdates",0) 

$configEntity = New-Object "Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.Deployment.ConfigurationEntity" 

$configEntity.LogicalName="Deployment" 

$configEntity.Attributes = New-Object "Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.Deployment.AttributeCollection" 

$configEntity.Attributes.Add($itemSetting) 

Set-CrmAdvancedSetting -Entity $configEntity

After the script is executed, you may go to Deployment Manager and apply the patch to the DB at the tenant level.  Just want to clarify that you are still installing the update rollup bits to the servers, and the above script will disable the updates to the CRM databases. All tenants will get the new UR bits, there are no ways around it, but the bits are backward compatible so they will work with older database schema.

I hope this will help you in your CRM project!