Domino Diva

In working with a customer to do some performance tuning of their Domino environment, it became very apparent that Domino release 8 requires less memory.  This particular customer is running 7 Domino servers on one LPAR on a 550 (iSeries).  Three of the Domino servers provide mail and calendaring services for about 1500 users, one server is a Sametime server providing instant messaging services, and the other three servers are used for development and testing of applications that integrate with back-end data. 

The customer was running Domino 6.5.5 prior to the upgrade.  They upgraded to release 8.0.1 on April 19.  The graph below shows a significant reduction in paging and faulting rates as soon as the upgrade happened.


The paging and faulting rates went from around 700-800 faults/second down to 300-400 faults/second.  There were no changes to the NSF buffer pool sizes for any of the servers, the only thing that changed was the release of Domino.  The graph shows pool 2, which is the base memory pool for i5/OS.  This is where all Domino servers run by default, so this was a pretty standard setup.

This significant reduction in paging and faulting would result for a customer with a similar configuration upgrading from release 7.  I have found there is very little different between release 6 and 7 servers from a memory management and consumption perspective.  Release 8 however is significantly more efficient when it comes to memory consumption.