Lotus Domino Performance Tuning - IBM

Lotus Domino Performance Tuning 

This document serves as the transcript to the Lotus Society Hong Kong Talk 

“Domino Performance Tuning”. The transcript contains additional information not 

provided in the slide deck used. 

1.Overview 

The Domino7 Performance Tuning Guide has 160 pages, which is a tough call to 

summarize in this short talk. You can download the free guide here: 

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpieces/abstracts/redp4182.html 

Figure 1 Dimensions of Performance Tuning 

Tuning is not a sport or an dark art, it is rather a series of well defined steps to 

improve performance. Keep in mind: if you don't improve your current bottleneck 

your tuning step will not have any visible impact. 

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Figure 2 Tuning Cycle 

Bottlenecks can be found anywhere, so careful analysis of your baseline data 

and your change results is needed. 

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Figure 3 Potential Bottlenecks 


2.10 Steps to get started 

• Have a plan 

• Know your infrastructure 

• Break down components 

• Have a baseline as reference 

• Measure baseline and analysis over time 

• Estimate benefits vs. cost 

• Have a change management plan 

• Prepare a backout and recovery plan 

• Do only one thing at a time; isolate individual changes 

• Finally let your changes get hold and measure them over time 

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Figure 4 Tuning cycle 

3.Hardware 


Your server layout can make a huge difference to your all over Domino 

performance. You have to ensure, that you design the system for the intended 

load. Considerations have to be given to CPU, Memory, Network and data 

storage I/O capabilities. 

Domino distributes its tasks over the available CPUs, so multiple cores will 

benefit the performance. On big systems you can run multiple instances of 

Domino taking further advantage of CPU power. 

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Figure 5 Network layout for Domino Domain 

You should keep your networks for server, internet, clustering and clients 

separate. 

Also storage should be distributed over more than one I/O channel. Fast disks 

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also help. Typically you would have OS, Applications and data on different 

partitions. Data increasingly in a SAN. 

You can improve performance if you put I/O intensive applications (e.g. your 

corporate CRM or time tracking application on a separate disk with its own 

controller). Also having RAID1 disks with their own controller for transaction 

tracking helps. 

ReiserFS seems to be a good choice for the transaction log. The log is written in 

16KB blocks with is well supported. 

4.Operating Systems 

The more the operating system is busy with other things Domino performance 

suffers. Little oddities on Windows: if you minimize the Domino server window 

performance suffers. 

Task to do: 

• Disable all tasks you don't need 

• Keep your drives de-fragmented (or use a file system that doesn't needs 

defragmentation like Linux/Unix file systems) 

• Switch of the anti-virus scanning NSFs on access (they need to scan 

documents not NSF files) 

• No screen saver please (Switch of screen in the power settings) 

Keep an eye on memory limits (8.0.1 will do 64Bit, then this is gone) 

Figure 6 Default Memory Limits 

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5.Server Settings 


There are settings on the server that impact performance. Some of them 

shouldn't be touched for the sake of security. Most prominently the Port 

encryption of the network port(s). Don't mess with them. 

Things to check: 

• Remove services not needed 

• How many replicators do you need (more can be better!)? 

• Enforce_Personal_Agents=1 to switch personal agents off 

• Check # of concurrent agents 

• Check the various Amgr_ variables for Notes.ini ---> be careful there! 

• Don't use HTTP logging if not needed 

• show stat domino.cache 

• Increase HTTP threads 

• UPDATE_FULLTEXT_THREAD=1 

• Multiple Server Mailboxes 

• Server_Session_Timeout 

• view_rebuild_dir=X:\pathname\ 

• Switch off all network protocols but TCPIP 

• Consider a single NotesNamedNetwork 

• 

6.Database 

The key of database tuning measures can be found in the design of the 

database rather then in the parameters. However there are some settings that 

impact performance: 

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Figure 7 Performance impacting settings 

• Unread marks 

• Document table map 

• Free space (compact often) 

• Response hierarchy 

7.Applications 

Application design is responsible for a lot of potentially bad performance. With 

some good will it is possible to kill the strongest Domino server. There are a 

number of considerations to speed things up. 

To get a full view what happens in a Notes client application you can switch on 

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connection debugging in the Notes client. 

Things to do: 

• Replace @DBLookup/@DBcolumn with @GetProfilefield 

• Replace GetNthDocument with getNextDocument 

• Use ViewEntryCollections instead of NotesDocumentCollections 

• Don't run through NotesDatabase.AllDocuments 

• Don't do @Dblookup in ReadMode! 

• Remove @Now and @Today from views 

• Use single category views for ReaderName access 

• Use LIST in LotusScript 

• Don't build large document collections 

• Don't Redim Preserve large arrays 

• Use Julian's StringBuffer class for string concatenation 

• replace db.search with NotesView.getAllDocumentsByKey 

• StampAll is fast 

• Remove script from your form globals 

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8.Measure! 


Figure 8 Reporting and Monitoring 

Figure 9 Monitoring database 

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Figure 10 Statrep is your friend! 

9.Web Resources 

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/library/ls-Port_encryption/index.html 

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/performance/ 

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg245602.html 

http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=203&uid=swg27008523 

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/library/ls-IO_subsystems/ 

side1.html 

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/library/ls-HTTP_Threads_settings/ 

index.html 

http://searchdomino.techtarget.com/generic/0,295582,sid4_gci1270148,00.html 

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpieces/abstracts/redp4182.html 



http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21234550 

http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21173877 

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Lotus Domino Performance Tuning - IBM

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