Improve Check Report Performance by Reducing the Size of Company Logo and Signature Image Files

Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 uses SSRS as its report engine. For each data source in a report, SSRS retrieves the data by making a call to AOS Query Service, which streams back the data in xml. The size of streaming dataset from AOS Query Service has a limit of about 1GB, partly due to the limitation of .Net (Stack Overflow). And, the Query Service performance will drop significantly or throw exception when approaching this limit.

Normally, a report is unlikely to reach this limit to cause out-of-memory exception or a significant performance drop. However, Check report is more subject to it, where data are prepared in a temp table and then streamed to SSRS. A check often contains images of the company Logo and signature.  A batch of check printing requests often contains a large number of checks, say 500 or even 1000s. In such cases, customers will get close to or even hit the limit. The check printing either becomes unbearably slow or fails.

You can work around the issue in the current released version by reducing the image size of both company logo and signature using compressing method.  You may not see the improvement unless you batch up a large number of checks to print.

To change the company logo, you need to use an image compressing tool to compress your company logo and signature files into smaller files. Avoid using BMP file format; use compressed image format such as JPG instead. Once you have the smaller image file ready,  open bank accounts form and select Set up/Check: Company>Cash and bank management>Common>Bank accounts

Click on Company and Signature tab respectively to load the smaller files you created earlier.

Please note that smaller images in reports in general benefit the printing speed.