How to Change BCM Polling Interval?

This post explains how one can change the polling interval in BCM. Please note that this is suggested only for advanced users and for the environment where BCM is used in shared mode.

What is Polling Interval?

When BCM is used in shared environment, all BCM clients poll the server machine to see if there are any changes to BCM data. This allows BCM client to display the most up-to-date data. By default, BCM clients polls server every second in order to ensure that any changes to data made by any client are available to all the clients immediately. Although a short polling interval is desirable so that new data are immediately available, server and client machines pay the cost of frequent polling. In certain BCM usage scenarios (for example, many clients are connected to server), you might get improved performance if polling interval is set higher than default of one second. If the polling interval is set too high, clients will process the changes less frequently but they will have to process more changes at a time. So, you might have to experiment with different values and set the one that works for

How to Change Polling Interval?

In BCM SP1, we have added a registry key that you can tweak to increase the polling interval. Make sure to close Outlook with BCM before changing the registry key value.

The setting is controlled by “HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Business Solutions eCRM\PollingInterval” registry key. The key should be a DWORD (32-bit) value, the number represents the interval in milliseconds. By default this is 1000 (1sec), changing this to some higher value could help reduce the load on the database. This reg key needs to be added on each BCM client machine. We don't have any recommendation for what value to use because every user's requirements might be different (For example, one might prefer getting updates more frequently than system overhead). But you could try out with 30 seconds and see if you notice any difference. By default "PollingInterval" key value might not exist. First create a DWORD key in “HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Business Solutions eCRM” and then set its value.

I hope it helps answer some of the comments about polling interval.

-Mukesh