HiWe have build an entire customer relation management system from scratch over the last 4 years. Its a highly complex system and contains roughly 800.000 documents at the moment.
In addition to the main database there are 10-12 other databases, controlling features like websites, task management, mail archiving and so on.
We have purchased a brand new server, with windows 2003 server, 8 cpu’s, raid controllers, fast discs and 8 Gb RAM - But we are getting almost no performance gain?!?
(the old server had 2 cpu’s, no raid, and 4 Gb RAM)
There is nothing else but the Domino server running on the server.
We have tasks to update data across the main database, which takes about 5 minutes on the old server. When we run that task on the new server it still takes 5 minutes.
We have monitored the task manager while running the task with only one user online, and the CPU runs at about 3-4%, the network utilization is about 10-12%, and the RAM utilization is about 25%.
This cant be right - its ok if the server doesnt commit 100% ressources to a task thats triggered from a Notes client, but it should commit a lot more that it does right now.
We need help here We have been all over the web trying to find best practices and performance tips but nothing obvious is sticking out.
Do you have suggestions to the setup on the server or in the administrator or something else please let me know.
32 bit or 64 bit? There is a limit on what a 32 bit system can do with memory so true 64 bit is the way to go.
Also over the years I believe that the consensus is that 2 processors works best. If you have say, double that your talking about more processors battling for the same cache which will not help performance but probably not hurt it either, just more expensive.
Other things are network bottle necks. Do you have the fastest network card you can get to match network speed?
Disk performance has been the facet I have most seen though as the lack of performance culprit. Also disk performance depending on the SAN your using but mostly check the disk I/O on the server. It’s been my experience that’s where most performance is lost.
Check the Performance Monitor for Pages/sec and Avg. Disk Queue Length on your Windows server. Experience will tell when these numbers are too high or just right.
Other factors are clustering and back up schemas. Especially back ups, how long they take etc.
I haven’t had a chance to work with R8 yet, but this sounds like a regular disk access issue.
Setup the Windows Performance Monitor to log your disk activity. That should give you an idea of what your disks are doing.
You say you went from no RAID to RAID, but that doesn’t gaurantee a performance increase. If you had two or three individual disks in the old server, then it is very possible that the division of work between them might have been optimal to get the most performance out of the system.
You didn’t say what kind of RAID you setup. RAID 5 is very bad for Domino because Domino is a write-intensive application. Writes on a RAID 5 are very expensive. A three disk RAID 5 may perform worse than a single disk when it comes to writes. RAID 1+0 is best for Domino, but expensive to set up (you only get half of the total disk space you purchased.)
IBM realizes how bad the disk usage is, and on their test machines they always use multiple RAID 0 sets to divide the workload. Here’s an example configuration. Each one of these had its own RAID array…
The Lotus Domino executable files
Mail databases
Transaction log
Mail Journaling
Microsoft Windows pagefile
The machine that this example was take from contained 42 disk drives in 6 RAID 0 arrays.
We have been all over the web trying to find best practices and performance tips but nothing obvious is sticking out.