Notes client performance is painfully slow

[wuneyej]

Not being a database guy, I know very little about Lotus Notes, but some directors here at work have put me on a project team with one of the goals being the improvement of client upload/download times. In an effort to make some valuable contribution to the project, I've come to ask you Notes professionals for some advice.

Details:
The Domino R5 server runs on Windows NT 4.0 Server, SP 6a. 512MB RAM. The server itself resides in the Chicagoland area, where I am.

All Clients are part of a huge corporate LAN, no dialup. Clients in the Chicago office have no performance issues. Clients in Minnesota say performance is okay. But performance for clients in California is so slow that the application is useless to them. They claim it takes several seconds just to tab over to the next field.

The database they're struggling with is about 3.7 GB in size.

Notes clients are all R5 and all run on Windows 2K PCs.


Replication is currently not being used by any clients. I've been told using replication for a database this size would not work. If this is true, what size would the database file need to be brought down to? Is there anything else that can be done to allow the California clients to use Notes effectively, short of spending the bucks to increase bandwidth?

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

JP

 

[itsp1965]

Typically the issues involved in poor Notes performance are;

1. Speed of WAN links

If your connection between Chi and Cali is slow or has to cross many routers, you will find Notes painfully slow. This is especially true with regards to loading images

2. Application design
A poorly designed app will give you grief period.

I guess another server storing a local copy of the database is out of the question. Otherwise the best bet for a slow link would be to use packet shaping on the WAN in order to provide priority to Notes traffic.

 

[Packet7]

Hello,
I would try and trim the DB. But also look at the access in CA. How many users? Can you deploy a Domino Application server there? If not, you could burn a replica of the DB on a DVD and have each user copy it to their PCs. Then schedule replication. Of course you would need to run some tests, but we have a similar approach in production with two servers. They replicate the changes, and nobody utlizes the WAN for DB usage. The replication is compressed by Domino and provides increased WAN performance.
Hope this helps.

Rgds,

John Judge

 

[wuneyej]

itsp1965 and John...thanks for the replies. I'm guessing management won't be willing to spend the dollars to increase bandwidth, so that's a weak link my coworkers and I will have to accept. I don't know the complexities of packet shaping, but I'll mention it to those who may have a better understanding.

Everyone on the team seems to agree trimming down the database by archiving some years-old data would be a good idea. Obviously, this would cut down on replication time if we went that route. But I'm wondering...what if we did substantially trim down the size of the database, but continued to have the California users connect directly to the original copy of the database on the server here in Chicago? Is there reason to believe they'd struggle any less with data entry time?

If we were to implement a replication procedure, it's my understanding that could be done two ways. We could have each Cali user (I believe there are about 10 of them) replicate a copy on each of their PCs, or we could set up another Domino server in Cali that would replicate with the Chicago Domino overnight. Is that correct?

I'm not sure where we stand with the software liscensing. If we keep the same number of users, but set up a second Domino Server, could there be additional liscensing costs?

Thanks so much for your help,

JP

 

[itsp1965]

JP, you are better off having a server placed in Cali as opposed to having users maintain their own local replicas of the database which could prove to be a mgmt nightmare. As for licensing, you will need an additional server license. Like you mentioned, even if you trim down the database it will still prove to be too slow to work with over latent links.

 

[wuneyej]

Thanks for the info, itsp. There may be more questions to come.

 

[tbasher]

If you can find a way to license an additional server, it will make a difference. Your cal users can then replicate local and your chi user will replicate local as well. You can then setup a clustered system and have the servers replicate with one another every hour or so.

 

[AncientTiger]

So I guess, what the gist of all this is that one can't expect to be able to replicate 700,000 records over a statewide latent network with 1000+ users (100+ simultaneous connections).

One of our users has had his laptop connected to the LAN for THREE DAYS now, replicating and replicating and replicating (it's 78% done at this point)...

Like wuneyej, I'm not much of a Notes DB guy (work mainly in Microsoft), but to me 3 days is about 2 days and 20 hours longer than I'd give ANY database to process 700,000 records.



------------------------------------
Over 20 years of programming, and still learning every day!

 

[dw12345]

I would check the aplication design, I have seen using dblookup to access remote data cause huge delays. Most often it has been a developer using a dblookup into a large view that is frequently updated causing reindexing when the dblookup is called which will cause the client to just sit and wait until indexing is complete.

 

[JasonU]

i agree with itsp and tbasher, get a small server\big desktop in the office.

exe: in one region where i worked in south africa, where bandwidth alone is a crisis, our it dept opted to get a small application server (glorified desktop P3, 256mb ram) with some diskspace. it ran a db which was 3.5gb big, but users did the work and at night the replication would update both sides. till this day, i hear that that little server is now running mailfiles only of which there are 500+ users.

regards

 

[pduda]

I'd check design too. Look for how many views you have and how frequently they change. Also, check for a full text index on the database and if there is one, see if it is set to immediately update - I have seen this kill apps located on a server that is down the hall from me.

pd