Currently when you select a collection(s) in the console, then utilize the "Add Selected Item" button you are able to functionally add the collection(s) selected to another collection as a member, however it does not actually add the member of the selected collection(s) to the target collection just the root collection itself.

Example A:
1. Open Console and navigate to Administration \ Assets and Compliance \ Device Collections \ Select a collection.
2. Click the "Add Selected Items" button and then "Add selected items to existing device collection"
3. Select the existing collection that is to be the target

The collection itself now shows in the membership of the target collection, however the members of the collection added are not and are not utilized by the target collection.

Example B:
1. Open Console and navigate to Administration \ Assets and Compliance \ Device Collections \ Select a collection and open it.
2. Select a device or devices in the collection
3. Click the "Add Selected Items" button and then "Add selected items to existing device collection"
4. Select the existing collection that is to be the target

The devices themselves now shows in the membership of the target collection.

Since the functionality of this ribbon button is a part of the Core XML files for the console stored "%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Configuration Manager\AdminConsole\XmlStorage\ConsoleRoot." it is not supported to modify them by Microsoft per the article here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh949647.aspx

Please update the code for this button \ process to add the members of a selected collection to the target collection truly or grey the button out when collections are selected instead of devices \ users so that the "Add Selected Items" cannot be utilized.

Today we use an automated process to populate our device collections with machines from a fore-front configuration system.

After we had exceeded 250000 machines in some collections adding new machines to these large collections has become a real pain. Meanwhile it takes from 40s to 7 minutes to a add a single machine. The SCCM console cannot be used anymore for large collections. It crashes with OOM when the collection is opened or a new computer is added using right click.

Interestingly execution times don't really differ in terms of the number of machines added in one call of the respective API.
Since a machine is usually member in about 60 collections it can take up to 7 x 60 = 4 hours to add a new computer to all the necessary collections!

For this we already have taken optimzations to do some things in parallel already but this should make it clear:

A single new machine may stresses our SCCM for hours.

To add a machine to a collection we use the API as described in http://www.moyerteam.com/2013/12/adding-user-accounts-collection-addmembershiprules-method/ to add devices to collections.

We have already done several optimizations suggested by product support as allocating more memory to the WMI provider and running it in a dedicated process and even on a dedicated server. Nothing helps unfortunately.

There seem to exist architectural limitations imposed by WMI itself or the implementation of the method addMembershipRules preventing a speed up but i am not technical enough to prove that.

Wouldn't there be another way to speed this up? When we trace the activities in SQL server we see that adding a machine to a device collections just adds a row in table CollectionMembers.
I understand that SCCM does some more checks but should these really take 40s?

If the performance of AddMembershipRules really can't be improved we would like to have an interface to SCCM bypassing WMI, e.g. based on Stored Procedures or a REST API.

I am looking the issue/design from SMS 2003 to SCCM 2012 version. I am not sure if any purpose must be behind of this design of collection default query select * from sms_r_system.
Whenever a user create the query based device collection, if there is any modification in the query
He/she shouldn’t remove the entire query and apply OK.
If user applies ok, its automatically select * from sms_r_system query will enabled, it will targed to all system which is “All system” as limiting collection.
It has serious issue in most the companies, deployment is performing by L1 or L2 engineers.
It is nowhere document in the MS TechNet or in Blog.
I would strongly recommend to have some kind of mechanism to avoid this kind of changes in upcoming released.
You can reach me on email : kannancs@hotmail.com if you need any clarification.