Performance

Normally performance isn't an issue since the usage of Logtrade Connect normally is consignment by consignment. But if you are processing a high number of consignments and maybe have enabled automated consignment creation, you can run into issues since each consignment takes a couple of hundred milliseconds to process when sending it to Logtrade.

Consider a situation where you have 500 different sales order in the same warehouse pick and have a consignment creation rule that creates and sends consignment to Logtrade automatically when registering the pick. If each consignment takes 200 milliseconds to process by Logtrade, the total time will be over 1.5 minutes. This causes stress on Business Central that needs to deal with table locking during that time. If you also send the consignments as released, each consignment (will all it's surrounding data) needs to be moved to archive tables in Business Central.

This document describes some areas in Logtrade Connect that can have effect on performance.

Bandwidth and response time

Since Logtrade Connect communicates with Logtrade through an online API, the bandwidth and response time has effect on the performance. Long response times means slower execution and longer lock times in Business Central, which also affects other users. By examining the message log you can track the response time for each web service call to Logtrade.

Logtrade Integrated Printer

Logtrade Integrated Printer should be installed on a server on the same local network as the physical printers. Installing on an Azure Server (maybe a low spec server with no dedicated resources) may harm performance. You will notice this if it takes a long time between the consignment is updated in BC and that the Integrated Printer picks up the print job and performs the print.

Batch sizes

In the delivery setup the fields Batch Change Status and Batch Size Get Status decides how many consignments to send each time to Logtrade when changing status and querying for status. The default value is 500. If you send to many, and to big, consignments in one request you might experience a timeout because of processing time in Logtrade. Preparing a consignment with one (1) package in Logtrade is faster compared to a consignment with many hundred packages. This setting can be altered if you are experiencing timeout issues. Normally timeout issues is because of network latency.

Archiving of released consignments

Moving a consignment and it's surrounding data from the working tables to the archive tables is a costly process. If you archive a big number of consignments at the same time you might experience locking issues. If you combine this with high volume of automatically processed consignments it gets worse. Therefore it is possible to control if a released consignment shall be archived automatically or not with the setting Automatic Archiving of Released Consignments in the delivery setup. If you disable this setting a released consignment will remain in the list of consignments until it is archived manually in the consignment worksheet or on a scheduled basis. You can read more about scheduling consignment archiving here.

Extended consignment lock for batch processing

If you have activated rules for automatic consignment processing and produce a high volume of consignments, you might consider activating the extended loch mechanism for batch processing in the delivery setup. This functionality acts as a gatekeeper for processes that potentially needs to process many consignments at the same time without interruption. These processes are:

Automatic consignment creation triggered by rules for automatic consignments (posting warehouse pick etc.)
Booking multiple consignments using the consignment worksheet.
Changing status for multiple consignments using the consignment worksheet or as a scheduled process.
Fetching status for multiple consignments using the consignment worksheet or as a scheduled process.
Validating delivery data on sales orders (since this can be done unattended in batches when importing sales orders from an external system).