Does Domino reuse whitespace?

HCL Domino Domino Forum
1

Hi,

If a user deletes mail from their mail file, hence creating whitespace, will subsequent emails that are added to that mail file first try to reuse the whitespace or will they immediately add additional disk space used to the mail file?

I know Compact will reclaim whitepace for me, but I am interested in whether Domino itself reuses whitespace, irrespective of compact. I always assumed it did/would, but a quick test on my environment suggests that that is perhaps not the case.

Any words of wisdom / definitive knowledge on the subject would be much appreciated

Thanks

Paul

2

Subject: Does Domino reuse whitespace?

As far as I know - It will try to use the white-space for any updated or new documents. Extending the file-size only happens if there’s not enough white-space.

3

Subject: Does Domino reuse whitespace?

Domino does reuse whitespace. Keep in mind, though, that whitespace is fragmented within the database until you run compact with the lowercase b option. If you are trying to save something to the file, Domino will attempt to reuse whitespace if a large enough contiguous chunk is available. If not, then additional allocation will occur from the operating system.

For the reasons above, it is recommended that you maintain a healthy amount of whitespace within the database and defrag it regularly using compact -b.

4

Subject: RE: Does Domino reuse whitespace?

Great, that makes sense as it confirms my longstanding assumption that Domino does try to reuse but also that the db size can still grow as in the test that concerned me - I was trying to add a huge document in that test so there was obviously not a large enough block of whitespace to reuse

Thanks

Paul