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Performance Profiler overview

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If a business process takes longer than expected, your administrator can use the Performance Profiler page in Business Central, sometimes also called the in-client Performance Profiler, to record a snapshot of the process. While recording, the profiler monitors all of the apps that are involved in the process. These include first-party apps from Microsoft, such as the Base Application and System Application, and any third-party apps that you have installed, such as AppSource apps or per-tenant extensions (PTEs). Identifying where the holdup is can make it easier to go to the correct support organization or, if you have developers in-house, fix the problem yourself.

Invoking the Performance Profiler page

To get started working with the Performance Profiler, follow these steps:

  1. In Business Central, choose the Tell me what you want to do icon, enter Performance Profiler, and then choose the related link.
  2. Choose the Open this page in a new window icon. icon in the upper right corner of the page.

    Note

    This opens the profiler in a separate window, which is convenient for starting and stopping the recording.

    You can also access the Performance Profiler page from under Help & Support, under Analyze Performance, which will open the Performance Profiler page a separate window.

  3. Now, still in Business Central, navigate to the page or process that you want to record profiling data for.

    Tip

    To get the most accurate results, you should start and stop the recording of the slow process as close to where you experience the performance issues as possible.

  4. When ready, press the Start button in the Performance Profiler page, and then perform the process that you want to record. When you're done, press the Stop button.

The profiler has now recorded the process and displays the results under Active Apps, where you can aggregate by App Name or App Publisher. For more information, see Analyzing high-level results.

Toggle the Show technical information button to show the time spent and the call tree. To drill down into this data, see Viewing advanced results.

Analyzing high-level results

After you record a snapshot, you get the following insights:

  • The Active Apps chart shows the apps that were active during the recording of the profile. They were either running or called other apps. The duration represents the time you might save by removing an app.

You can use the App Name and App Publisher actions to filter the charts to view the aggregated time spent per publisher, and across multiple apps from a publisher.

Viewing advanced results

If you want to dig into the technical specifics, you can turn on the Show technical information toggle. That adds the Time Spent by Application Object and Call Tree FastTabs. The following table describes the FastTabs.

FastTab Description
Time Spent by Application Object This FastTab shows the objects, such as pages, codeunits, and tables, that were involved in the process. The interesting things here are the Time Spent and Samples columns. The Time Spent column focuses on the object, and shows how long it was active during the recording. The Samples column shows the number of times that the profiler sampled the performance of the object.
Call Tree The Self Time and Total Time columns show where time is spent in the code. The Self Time column shows the amount of time spent in the method only, and excludes calls out of the method. The Total Time field is the Self Time amount plus calls out of the method.

Sharing and downloading performance profiles

If you want to share a recording, for example, if you're in contact with the company that provided an app that you think is slowing down a process, you can share the recording with them. Choose the Share button on the Performance Profiler page, and send the link to the app provider.

You can also download the recording and, for example, copy the file to OneDrive to share it with your colleagues. Choose the Download button on the Performance Profiler page, and then choose Yes in the confirmation dialog. The file is downloaded to your default download location.

Clear performance profiles

If you want to clear the performance profile data, for example, if you want to start over with a new recording, choose the Clear button on the Performance Profiler page. The data is now cleared, and you can start a new recording.

Uploading performance profiles

To upload an existing performance profile, choose the Upload button on the Performance Profiler page, and then choose the file that you want to upload. The file must be in right format (.alcpuprofile), and you can only upload one file at a time.

The in-client Performance Profiler and the AL Profiler

The in-client Performance Profiler described in this article, is a simplified version of the AL Profiler for AL in Visual Studio Code. Using the performance profiling editor view in Visual Studio Code, you can investigate the time spent on a process using top-down and bottom-up call stack views and drill-down further into advanced data for the specific snapshot, as well as navigate to source code. For more information, see AL Profiler overview.

Scheduled performance profiler overview
Managing technical support
Escalate support issues to Microsoft
Debugging
Snapshot debugging