I’ve spent the last two days working with Lotus Notes on numerous platforms and am slightly impressed with xPages, extremely impressed with server performance, but the client just doesn’t cut it.
On my Vista machine (64-bit 8GB RAM Quad Core) the client loads slowly, is very cumbersome to use, and crashes while designing views and xpages. It crashes about once every hour or so… Not good.
So…
I moved to an XP machine on a clean VM session and got the exact same sluggish performance and regular client crashes.
So…
I went to my MAC and what do you know? There still isn’t a designer for the MAC – UGGGGGGHHHHH… I loaded the client and wasn’t impressed either.
If I use a database with a couple views, couple forms, etc., the thing actually keeps up. But with any real database you click – wait (sometimes up to a minute) and then interact with a control (on xPages).
I surely hope that IBM will be able to put some firepower under the client. Right now, its barely usable.
As to me, I have directly the opposite impression about how Lotus Notes 8.5 for Win XP works. Much faster and smoother! It does not crash.But Domino Designer 8.5 sometimes is slow when it loads a database. And cursor always disappears.
Yes, I can verify this… 3 installs…3 different machines and the designer takes forever “refreshing” when opening a database…(a standard pre v8 database)
The client is also less “snappy” and my machine scores a 5.9 across the board on the WinVista scale.
The server, on the other hand, seems to perform much better than 8.0.2 and it no longer takes a half hour to restart (there are about 7,000 databases on that server). That problem began with 8.0.1 where it seemed to consistency check every DB before it would start running.
I’m also slightly impressed with xPages and how it makes my views look more impressive. I’m using them in a new application…
Speaking of xpages…
I miss lotusscript, but javascript and java are more universal so its just a matter of time before I get comfortable again.
I would love to see an xPages manual or book. The online help gives you enough information to get the feet wet and Notes Wiki has some good stuff in it too.
Most of my work has been using web 2.0 stuff for quite some time. I spent a long time putting together some very cool libraries that work with jQuery and the one area I really wanted to work with was views. xPages does a good job.
I’m sure Lotus will figure out how to speed the client up (especially when working on remote databases) but for now I have 8.0.2 on my machine and 8.5 in a vmware session so I can use 8.0.2 for 95% of my work and 8.5 when I need to work with xpages.
…is the slowness with the Designer client installed (even if Designer is not launched) or with the Note “only” client? Or both?
Curious because the performance testing we did required 8.5 to be equivalent of 8.0.2 and that goal was met or exceeded. So trying to get a sense for what is different in your experience.
I use the old-style workspace tabs so I can see the numerous databases I work with.
Actual use on the client of loading documents from server is about the same. Rendering the documents takes longer. In fact, rendering just about any control seems to take longer than in prior clients.
FYI: comparision is between the 8.0.2 standard client and 8.5 on Eclipse. I did not use 8.0x on Eclipse.
Here’s a few things I found…
#1. I saved all my script libraries which were javascript includes with a .js – so my actual library name would be myFunctions.js → well, when you add this as a resource to an xPage is appends .js to the name, so it ends up myFunctions.js.js in the xpage source. No biggie, I just remove the extra .js – but I think it should bring over the correct name.
#2. My computer screen blanks up whenever I spend much time working with a view object in xpages – requiring a PC reboot. It seems to lock up if I spend much time playing with the pager component.
#3. In the client and designer you don’t always get a menu to display when clicking the right mouse button (such as database properties). Sometimes it shows instantly, sometimes it moves with the mouse, and sometimes it won’t show up for a minute or so.
#4, if I set a row color (by using a column formula to determine the foreground and background color) it works in Notes, works on the Web (using the actual view → …?openview) but doesn’t work with the xpage view. I think this might have been overlooked in development.
Finally – how do you change the background color of the pager row – not the actual background of the pager, but the entire cell it occupies?
Either way, it is nice to have some web 2.0 functionality and I’m sure it will only improve with time.
As Bruce Elgort and others have posted: you can increase the speed of the eclipse environment by providing it with a bigger heap. Look for the jvm.properties in side the framework directory. The original lines are:vmarg.Xmx=-Xmx256m
vmarg.Xms=-Xms48m
max heap size and min heap size. Set max to atleat 512, and min heap size too. Do not set them higher than available RAM! A not very corborated sweet spot seems to be 1024