What Will Be the Most Important Performance Enhancement in Dynamics AX 2009? Try Scaling of the AOS

With the release of Dynamics AX 2009 coming very soon, one of the key improvement areas worthy of examination is performance. In DAX 4.0, we all saw the great performance gains accomplished via optimistic concurrency locking with SQL Server 2005, as well as increased performance on the AOS (application object server) and client / server communciation.

In DAX 2009, we can expect many additional improvements, with the top one being scaling of the AOS.

The Dynamics AX performance group investigated carefully the hardware, to learn how the hardware vendors were improving at that level. Seeing this meant seeing sockets with multi-cores, being that of dual or even quad.

In DAX 4.0, the standard setup is a dual processor machine for an AOS to run on, with 2GB of RAM for that AOS instance.

Well, in DAX 2009, the performance group looked to x64-bit enabling, and so now DAX 2009 AOS can run in x64 bit mode. This means that it can now take advantage of greater amounts of RAM, which allows greater flexibility than the 2 GB limit in DAX 4.0.

In terms of the multi-core, the team saw this as something for DAX 2009 to take advantage of, so parrellel processing code in DAX 2009 now exists, which can take true advantage of multi-core technology.

It's worth mentioning that, as part of the x64-bit enabling, that does not mean 32-bit can also be scaled. But it's a known fact that x64-bit means you can truly allocate more RAM, and therefore x64 bit will out-perform a 32-bit of the same scale, size and load.

Not to get too far into the details behind this scaling of the AOS, but it was mentioned by the performance group that they changed the memory manager ...