We are running Lotus Notes / Domino with version 6.5.3 on the clients and on the server. The server OS is Windows 2000 Server SP4 and the clients are all Windows 2000 Professional SP4. We are seeing a 3 to 5 minute period every morning where all the Notes clients freeze up simultaneously. After 3 to 5 minutes they all resume normal operation.
There are no scheduled events on the Notes server for that period of time, no entries in the Windows Event Logs (client or server) that correspond to that period of time, no significant file server (NetWare 5.1 on a different server) utilization level that corresponds and no other events running on the Notes server (like backups, etc.) Notes is running on a dedicated server so there are no other applications to interfere with Notes/Domino. I have run network monitoring software from the LAN switch manufacturer and it does not detect any failures during that period of time. Software that is monitoring the WAN connection shows no unusual level of traffic during that period of time.
Frankly, I am stumped at this. Management wants it fixed, but I have no idea what the problem is.
Could it be all the clients are going out to get virus updates at this time? Did you try and run procmon to see what the clients are doing (cpu, memory, disk…)?
What notes task are running at this time and are any of them grabbing memory, disk, cpu, network…? (nnotes.exe, ntaskldr.exe…)
What do you mean freeze up? Do the user have thier mail files open when this occurs? Other application databases, locally schedule agents?
Is there anything in the user’s log.nsf at this time?
By freezing up I mean that the Notes clients do not respond to user interaction. At this point most users have their mail file open and most are looking at the Inbox.
Sorry, I am not familiar with procmon. From what I have gathered from experience and talking to user it seems that other applications on the PCs are working fine.
Antivirus signatures are distributed from a local server and the logs do not show any corresponding distribution. Spot checking the local and server log.nsf does not show anything either.
I think that very few (if any) users have scheduled local agents.
perhaps a broadcast e-mail that goes out every morning to all users? How any users do you have? When our marketing dpt sends out a broadcast to our ~1500 users the server does bogg down a bit for a few minutes until all of the mail is processed.
Do you have any connection documents that start replication around that time?
We had an issue where heavy replication began as the first shift came in, followed by heavy view indexing, resulting in slow-to-no response for a few minutes.
changing the connection to start replication an hour or two earlier fixed it for us.
Is notes installed on the local c: drive or is it installed on a network share / drive and run from there?
I had a similar issue where notes was installed on a network share where network slowdowns were causing notes to appear to freeze or hang - it had nothing to do with notes but heavy traffic on the network at that time.
Peter has a good point as well, check the replication settings.