ID125 : Planning, Monitoring and Managing Server Performance

Why bother with performance. Well it lowers
the costs of ownership and make the end users a lot happier.

Monitoring Performance. This is best
done from the end users point of view, check your helpdesk call logs and
see what calls are coming in from users in relation to performance. It
is also good to keep and eye in the availability index stats that shows
how long it is taking to perform transactions. Obviously both DDM and Activity
Trends can also be used to measure performance.

Server sizing that is based on peak
times can mean that resources can go unused at off-peak times.  This
means you can schedule some other tasks for these times thus saving resources
and allowing more users on the server without the need for new hardware.
Some of these may be like the scheduled replication or the Indexer task.

The indexer task runs all the time.
In Domino 7 your can disable the indexer task using the UPDATE_Disable_Views=1
but the views are still updated when a user opens the database but for
mailfiles this may not be handy as users always leave their mailfiles open.
 You can schedule a view update using UPDALL.  Some more ini
parameters are

Update_Access_Frequencies=n ( default
7 )

Update_Note_Minimum=nb ( default 7 )

Update_Idle_Time=n ( Default 5 )

You can also increase performance by
tweaking the Full Text index by looking at the database properties. Now
if you wanted to disable all database that are set for hourly full text
updating you could change all databases or just add DEBUG_DISABLE_CHRONOS=1.
 This stops the chronos task from scheduling the hourly update task.

If you have a lot of agents on your
server you might want to look at how many threads you are using for Agent
Manager.  In DDM there is an Agent Application probe that will check
all agents to see which ones are using the most CPU time.  This is
handy for finding agents that could be scheduled for off-peak times.

If you are using domain indexing or
directory catalogues you should schedule these for off-peak hours.  Same
with server based archiving using program documents.

Reducing Resource Use

Keeping sessions open can be turned
on using the ini param MailLeaveSessionsOpen this is handy for servers
that do a lot of internal mail routing, leaving the sessions open will
lower bandwidth as handshaking between servers no longer needs to happen
for each session.

Avoid message conversion.  Keep
it in the senders format.

Mail rules.  The rules that fire
the most should be set first and use the new |Domino 7 Stop Rule Processing
feature.

Less logging. Turn off debug parameters
when not working with Lotus Support, lower or turn off logging to the console
whenre you can as it can be fairly resource intensive.  just keep
the logs your need.  If there is a problem you can always turn them
up when tracing the issue.

keep your databases in cache longer.
set NSF_DBCache_Max_Clean_Hold_Time=9999 so that opens are faster.this
isd handy for leveling out peaks when users are opening a lot of different
databases at the same time like just after lunch.

Server Consolidation

By moving users to fewer server you
have fewer servers to m onitor, upgrade, maintain, less replication traffic
on network and probably less email traffic as there is a higher chance
that the user you are sending to may be local. but a server failure will
effect more users ( unless you cluster ).One point of warning is that Domino
defaults are designed for moderate user loads, when you add more users
you may start hittings limits you have never encountered before like virtual
address space running out.

NRPC Max concurrent transactions is
20 is a multi processor server you should increate this with Server_Max_Concurrent_trans=n.
 

Multiple mail.box’s is another way of
reducing a bottleneck when your server has a lot of users.

PercentSysAvailResources=n% will tell
the server to reduce the amount of virtual memory the server thinks it
has, this is handy for partitioned servers so that no one server takes
up all the virtual memory but it can also be used on single partition servers
to help leave virtual memory for other non-domino tasks.

Reduce the Net Buffer size.  it’s
the 4th parameter in the TCPIP= ini variable.

New console command ‘Show Monitors’
will show how many agent monitors are running, these can take up virtual
memory space. Mail Rules are an example of monitors.  You can also
cap the number of mail rules per database using MailMaxFilters=n

RM_No_Log_Objects_In_Mailbox=1 will
turn off transaction logging just for the mail.box files.  this can
increase performance when large emails are being sent but it does mean
is a server goes down during the routing os a large email then it won’t
be in the transaction log for recovery.,

Database utilities ( like fixup, updall
etc ) on a server with a lot of databases may not finish in one night.
You can use program docs to scheule these tasks on different nights or
use indirect files to run the tasks on a set of databases per night.

The best way to reduce load and increase
performance is upgrade to Domino 7.