Does using two NIC's make sense?

HCL Domino Domino Forum
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Hi,

we are using a Domino 6.0.3 on a Windows 2000 Server system with 2 processors and 2GB main memory.

We are using the system for access with Notes Clients only, we have some big application databases with about 250.000 documents and 400 views.

I figured out some usefull notes.ini variables and was able to optimize the performance generally as well.

Our clients are only connected to the server with 10/mbit and the servers works with 100 mbit.

My question is: Does using two NIC’s improve the performance significantly ?

And if so, what is the best way to set it up ?

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Subject: Does using two NIC’s make sense ?

It depsnds on whose perfomance you want to improve. There are a couple of options here:

  1. If you get the NICs from the same mfr., and they are a good, higher-end brand (compaq, Intel, 3Com), you should be able to get software that lets you ‘team’ the NICs together to get better overall throughput to all your users. Individual users at 10Mbps aren’t going to notice that much, but it could help over time as you add people.

  2. Another option is to simply use the second NIC for IT purposes - backup channel, replication, other data center functionality.

  3. If you plan to cluster the server, a second NIC dedicated totally to cluster replication is HIGHLY recommended.

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Subject: RE: Does using two NIC’s make sense ?

Hi Greg,

thank you for your support.

If two ‘teamed’ NIC’s doesn’t improve the user performance significantly then it doesn’t make much sense for my company.

But the idea to assign specified tasks to the second NIC seems to be interesting.

But how can I assign tasks (e.g. SMTP, Replicator) to second NIC ?

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Subject: RE: Does using two NIC’s make sense ?

You can’t, really. You can just assign IP adresses to those NICs, then have your back program, for instance, connect to that IP to do backups, or set up your NOtes connection document to connect from server A to server B using the ‘Optional network address’ parameter and put in that IP address.

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Subject: Does using two NIC’s make sense ?

Frank,

In my experiences with large databases, disk I/O bottlenecks are usually the first culprit. If you continue to have issues, I would check the following:

  • Is the server transactionally logged with the TLOG volume on dedicated disk mirror AND controller channel

  • Is the indexing volume (that you have chosen with view_rebuild_dir=) located on it’s own mirror and channel?

  • Are the domino data and OS boot volumes all on their own drivesets?

You can detect disk I/O problems like this in Domino pretty quickly by enabling logical disk metrics in W2000 (diskperf -yv and reboot). Then run Windows perf monitor and under the logical disk entry, check the avg disk queue length for each volume on the server. If you divide the avg disk queue length for each logical volume by the number of spindles in that volume, you will get a numeric ratio. If it is constantly greater than about 0.8 you have a pretty good bottleneck, and over 1.0 it is severe.

This can help you determine if the disk HW needs to be reconfigured to adequately support your apps.

Hope this helps.

P.S. In these days of cheap memory, 2GB isn’t that much for a Domino server handling huge apps. In my environment I’d probably use at least 4GB for this situation.

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Subject: Re: P.S. In these days of cheap memory, 2GB isn’t that much for a Domino server handling huge apps. In my environment I’d probably use at least 4GB for this situation.

I thought domino had an inherit limitation of only being able to use 2GB? Did this limitation get removed with R6?

C>

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Subject: Does using two NIC’s make sense ?

I’ve setup 2 nics using Intel’s Adapter Teaming (Adaptive load balancing) and to be honest, it doesn’t seem to make any difference.We have 100 clients and a 9gig database (500,000 docs) but the amount of data never seems to be enough to congest 1 nic enough to make it start using the 2’nd.

I’ve actually seen Intel’s software cause problems (server stops responding) and i was forced to disable the 2’nd nic which fixed it.

We have similar hardware.

I’m curious what INI settings you’ve used to increase performance, always looking to optimize system response time.

Thanks

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Subject: RE: Does using two NIC’s make sense ?

Hi Steve,

so it seems to me that using 2 NICs doesn’t make that much sense.

I have just read the idea to assign specific tasks to second NIC but if that helps a lot ?

I read the well-known LDD documents about Server Performance Tunning and change about 10 INI entries and some forum posts (e.g. View_Rebuild_Dir).

But the most success brought me a redesign of our main applications according to the LDD documents about Application Performance.

The main steps were :

  1. I reduced the number of documents through establishing a archive.

  2. Reducing the amount of views and sortable columnes.

  3. I optimized my daily updall program with parameters -V -F

In my option the views are always the core of the problems.

Best regards

Frank