Domino Diva

I hadn't defragged my hard drive for a while.  I used Power Defragmentor this evening (which I highly recommend, http://power-defragmenter-gui.en.softonic.com/).  It has been over a few weeks since I ran my last defrag, I know, bad!  Prior to running Power Defragmentor, I had 3.87 GB free on my hard drive.  After running Power Defragmentor, I had 8.15 GB free.  I really need to schedule this to run more frequently.  Happy Defragging!

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. 

 I am very impressed with the new database property 'compress database design'.  I recently upgraded my test Domino server from 7.0.3 to 8.0.1 and played around with the 'compress database design' database property.  After doing a compact -c on the database to switch it to the new ODS, level 48, I saw this on the console:

 

Compacted mail/dadminis.nsf, 9472K bytes recovered (54%)

 

Here is a bit of a precursor to explain my test.  The mail file (dadminis.nsf) was using the Standard Mail 7 template.  It was still at ODS 43 after the upgrade.  The mail file only had 4 documents in it, so it was primarily comprised of design elements.  I set the notes.ini parameter Create_R8_Database=1 and restarted the server.  I did a 'load compact -c mail/dadminis.nsf' at the console, and got the above results, the 54% reduction in file size.

 

The size of the mail file (still the Standard Mail 7 tempate) went from 18 MB down to 8192 Kb.  Talk about a nice improvement for a base mail file.  Thank you to the Lotus team for this improvement!

 

Next on my target list is how much the database property 'compress document data' pays off.