New! Blackbaud CRM Performance Benchmarks

Matt Crawford

Hot off the press! Our new performance benchmarks whitepaper explores a wide range of topics related to performance, and provides some simple calculations to help determine if your hardware is properly sized for your database size and usage.  

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Over the years, there have been a few publications of performance benchmarks for Blackbaud CRM.  With each of these efforts, we've learned a little more about how our clients use the software, and have evolved our performance testing to include a broader range of testing scenarios under a variety of loads and constraining variables.  That's a wordy way of saying that we tested multiple workloads that were modeled after real Blackbaud CRM usage in a number of different ways.  The findings of these tests can be found in our recently published whitepaper: Performance Benchmarks for Blackbaud CRM. 


Since we expect a broad range of readers to view this information, we've written it in a way that will allow you to go as shallow or as deep as you want, yet still hopefully receive some value for your time. The breakdown of this paper is as follows:

Executive Summary: Longer than a typical executive summary, think of this as more of a "quick start guide."  This section includes the recommendations and sample formulas for Memory, CPU, Disk I/O, Network Bandwidth and Latency, and System Monitoring.

Body:  The body of the paper includes all of the general takeaways of the executive summary, only in far greater detail.  

Appendices: The appendices provide even more information about how the tests were run and how the recommendations were formed. Here you'll find appendices describing the workloads and systems configurations used in testing. 


Lastly, I'd like to share some information about the general intent of this document:

What it provides

• A framework for the factors to consider when planning for new Blackbaud CRM deployments, or re-sizing existing ones
• Proven guidelines based on performance tests against various configurations with realistic workloads
• Information on the testing process and details about the different configurations used in testing

What it does not provide

• Information on Database Maintenance and SQL Server configuration, such as MaxDOP settings, Data Compression, Index Maintenance, or Custom Indexes.  These topics are covered in previous posts to the Community and the Blackbaud Developer Network. 
• A guarantee that following the guidelines will result in optimal performance for every Blackbaud CRM deployment.  There are many factors that affect system performance.  This whitepaper focuses on capacity planning, which encompasses significant performance factors, but does not include recommendations for others, such as customizations.  

I mentioned above that this whitepaper represents the next step in the evolution our of performance testing.  We're continually looking for ways to improve our processes and provide as much value to our clients as possible.  As always, your feedback is encouraged.


-Matt