Recording Business Central NavContainerHelper benchmarks

By Steve Endow

As I've been using NavContainerHelper, it's become clear that there can be a lot of waiting as it downloads gigabytes of data for the images and hundreds of megabytes for the artifacts.  It then has to mash all of that together to build a Business Central Container.  It can take a while.

Sometimes it seems the process is pretty quick.  But sometimes the process seems to take forever.  When it's in the middle of doing its thing, I can't tell whether it's taking longer than normal, or if it just feels like it's taking a long time.

So I'm now measuring how long it takes for NavContainerHelper to create containers.

Ya gotta measure things

If the container setup process takes longer than normal, I'll want to know why.  Was it a performance issue downloading images or artifacts?  Or is there a performance issue with the VM?  Or did some error cause the script to fail prematurely?


Here's the PowerShell script I've setup to record the start time, end time, and elapsed time of the New-BcContainer process.  This is a sample that uses the values for building a BC container in my environment--you'll want to adjust the New-BcContainer parameter values to your preferred values.

 $StartTime = $(get-date)   
  Try {   
   $output = "Started: " + $StartTime   
   Write-Output $output    
   $containerName = 'bc1'   
   $password = 'P@ssw0rd'   
   $securePassword = ConvertTo-SecureString -String $password -AsPlainText -Force   
   $credential = New-Object pscredential 'admin', $securePassword   
   $auth = 'UserPassword'   
   $artifactUrl = Get-BcArtifactUrl -type 'Sandbox' -version '' -country 'us' -select 'Latest'   
   New-BcContainer `   
    -accept_eula `   
    -containerName $containerName `   
    -credential $credential `   
    -auth $auth `   
    -artifactUrl $artifactUrl `   
    -imageName 'myimage1' `   
    -dns '8.8.8.8' `   
    -updateHosts   
   }   
   Catch {   
    Write-Error "Um, something didn't go well:"   
    Write-Error $_   
   }   
   Finally {   
    $EndTime = $(get-date)   
    $output = "End time: " + $EndTime   
    Write-Output $output    
    $elapsedTime = $(get-date) - $StartTime   
    $totalTime = "{0:HH:mm:ss}" -f ([datetime]$elapsedTime.Ticks)   
    $output = "Elapsed time: " + $totalTime   
    Write-Output $output   
   }   

At the top of the script, I record the start time, then output that time in the log so that I can see when the script started.

I added a try/catch block so that even if the script fails, my script outputs the end time and elapsed time.

In the finally block, I record the time again, then calculate elapsed time.  The elapsed time is then output to the log.

Building a new named image vs. using an existing named image

In this example, I see that when the script had to build a new named image, it took 13 minutes to create the named image and then create the container.  But when it was able to use an existing named image, it only took 1 minute.

Good to know!

Now I can use this script to see how my dedicated physical server compares to my VMs.  I assume that the VMs will be slower, but I'm curious to see how much slower.


Steve Endow is a Microsoft MVP in Los Angeles.  He works with Dynamics 365 Business Central, Microsoft Power Automate, Power Apps, Azure, .NET, Dynamics GP, and SQL Server.

You can also find him on Twitter and YouTube

http://www.precipioservices.com