Project Operations SQL Timeouts and system slow down

Question

Good afternoon

Has anyone been experiencing SQL timeouts in D365 Project Operations when trying to select transactions for Invoicing or when trying to import Quote line details?

We have been having these issues for the past 4 weeks every Monday and Tuesday morning, although this week we had issues this morning.

Look forward to hearing

Kind regards

Catherine

Answer 1

Post/ask in the Dynamics community:

https://community.dynamics.com/

Answer 2

The described behavior matches general SQL timeout and performance issues rather than a known, specific outage in Project Operations.

For Project Operations scenarios that rely on SQL-intensive operations (such as selecting large transaction sets for invoicing or importing quote line details), the following patterns from similar Dynamics 365 and SQL timeout cases are relevant:

1. Long-running queries and timeouts
   • Timeouts typically occur when the underlying SQL operations take longer than the configured timeout period. This can be caused by large data volumes, complex queries, or blocking.
   • Similar to Dataverse plug-ins that fail with Execution Timeout Expired, blocking or heavy cascade operations can cause long waits and timeouts. If there are customizations (plug-ins, synchronous logic, or integrations) around invoicing or quote imports, review them for:
     • Long-running queries
     • Operations that trigger cascades on many related records
     • Recent schema changes (new tables/columns) that may not yet be fully optimized by indexes
2. Volume and batching of transactions
   • In other Dynamics 365 areas, large data sets are mitigated by filtering and batching. For example, Demand planning import jobs that time out are stabilized by:
     • Installing all relevant quality updates
     • Filtering data by company or date range to reduce the dataset per run
   • Apply the same principle in Project Operations:
     • When selecting transactions for invoicing, narrow the selection by date, project, or customer instead of pulling very large ranges at once.
     • When importing quote line details, split imports into smaller batches if possible.
3. Integration journal processing improvements (Project Operations)
   • Project Operations introduces integration journal processing improvements that specifically address long-running posting and race conditions:
     • Enable Enable integration journal processing improvements (10.0.37+). This prevents repeated retries on failing lines and allows multi-threaded posting.
     • Enable Post Project Operations Integration journal using multiple batch tasks to parallelize work.
     • In 10.0.38+, use Limit the integration journal lines per header to reduce the number of lines per journal (default 200). Lower values reduce posting time per batch and can help avoid timeouts.
     • Use Add filters to the Project Integration journal posting batch job (period start date, journal number, original journal number) so that problematic transactions are excluded until configuration issues are fixed.
   • If integration journal lines remain in a processing or pending state for a long time, reset them to Draft using Update to draft after confirming no batch posting is running.
4. SQL Server and CE/compatibility considerations (if using on-prem or self-managed SQL)
   • For environments backed by SQL Server, changes in the SQL Server Cardinality Estimator (CE) can cause performance regressions and timeouts for some queries.
   • If performance issues started after a SQL Server upgrade or servicing update, review the SQL Server compatibility level and CE settings for the database. In some cases, reverting CE to level 110 has improved performance for Configuration Manager workloads and may similarly help custom or heavy queries.
5. General troubleshooting steps
   • Correlate the timeouts with:
     • Peak usage windows (Monday/Tuesday mornings) and batch jobs or integrations running at the same time.
     • Recent changes: new customizations, plug-ins, integrations, or schema changes.
   • Check for blocking and long-running queries in the database during the problem window.
   • Ensure all relevant quality updates and platform updates for Dynamics 365 and Project Operations are applied.

If the pattern is strictly time-bound (only certain mornings) and reproducible, it is also advisable to:

• Review scheduled jobs (integration journals, batch posting, data exports/imports) that might overlap with invoicing and quote import operations.
• Temporarily reschedule heavy jobs or reduce batch sizes to see if the timeouts disappear.

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References:

• Troubleshoot Dataverse plug-ins
• Integration journal in Project Operations
• SQL query times out or console slow on certain Configuration Manager database queries