Import Customizations Timeout and Number of Custom Entities

As more and more people take advantage of the capabilities of CRM as a platform I’ve seen very interesting applications and verticals emerge. Some partners really squeeze out and push the limits of the system which is great because it helps us learn and enrich the product as we go along. Of course pushing something to its limits means that you may find bumps along the way. For example, one of the common situations that partners encounter when dealing with custom entities (and I’m talking about 100s of custom entities) is timeouts when importing customizations. This KB article (https://support.microsoft.com/kb/918609 ) details many steps that you can take to prevent/correct timeout issues. An interesting note that one of our partners pointed out and that is not evident on the KB article is that some settings (e.g. ExtendedTimeout ) are set in milliseconds… in the partner’s case setting the ExtendedTimeout to the suggested value of 1000000 was not enough (they really had A LOT of entities…~300).

The above surely makes you wonder… well, what is the absolute limit on the number of custom entities that CRM supports? The answer, as with many performance/scalability type of questions is “depends”… it really depends a lot on the complexity of the customizations, hardware, etc. I’ve seen systems with 250+ entities (even 300 as mentioned above) that work just fine….as mentioned, your mileage may vary but anything under 200 entities shouldn’t be a problem.