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Microsoft CRM 4 Asynchronous Service 100% CPU usage - Bad Workflows

Post Author: Joe D365 |

CRM 4 - Battling High Async CPU Usage

Once again we have been battling Microsoft CRM 4.0 and high CPU usage on the asynchronous process.  This time it appear to have risen out of nowhere.  Our quad core server went from 5% CPU usage all of the sudden to 100% CPU usage and workflows began taking 20 mins, then 30 mins, then not executing at all.

After a lot of debugging and many more gray hairs, we have found the cause....or in this case a bug caused by poorly designed workflows.

The issue is related to workflows that fire on deletion of a record AND try to check an attribute on the record.  For example, this simple, yet poorly written workflow can cause havok.


This workflow runs when a contact is deleted, then tries to check a field in the contact.  The contact is already deleted and the workflow execution goes into a loop taking down one CPU.

Running this bad workflow on on lets say 3 contacts can cause a server to go from this:

Into this:

Run this bad workflow on 3 more contacts and we have this:

You can now image what happens if we were to delete 20 or 30 contacts thus causing this workflow to run 20 or 30 times.  Havok and unhappy customers.

This is a bug and Microsoft is working on a hotfix.  However, when researching this we did not find any info on newsgroups or blogs.

Let us know your thoughts.

Joe CRM
By Joe D365
Joe D365 is a Microsoft Dynamics 365 superhero who runs on pure Dynamics adrenaline. As the face of PowerObjects, Joe D365’s mission is to reveal innovative ways to use Dynamics 365 and bring the application to more businesses and organizations around the world.

11 comments on “Microsoft CRM 4 Asynchronous Service 100% CPU usage - Bad Workflows”

  1. Hi Anders,

    Yep - actually, microsoft is working on a fix. We are testing and it works good. The KB when published will be KB970016

  2. Hi Carlos,

    That's the KB microsoft mentioned, but I don't think they have made the KB public yet.

    I'll send you an email with the patches. We have patched our dev and qa environments, but not production yet. Testing it a big longer.

  3. I am experiencing this same issue, I have been tracking it down for 2 days now. Please when will this be released?

  4. Actually we have the same issue. Please can you tell me what I have to install to solve this issue?
    Thank you.

  5. The hotfix apparently has not been made public, but Microsoft will give it to anyone that request. Request KB970016 directly from Microsoft and it should solve the issue.

    thx,

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