HORRIBLE SPR - Please bring your Lotus Support contracts to bear on this one

HCL Domino Domino Forum
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I wouldn’t normally poll the forum like this, but there is a significant regression bug in ND6/7/8 that still exists in 8.0.1 and 8.5 Beta 1. The ticket on this SPR (# DCOE6N82TP) has been open a couple of years because it is such a horrific bear to reproduce.

IBM has finally acknowledged that it is a bug, and a fairly significant one. However the fix for it will require an ODS update, meaning that 8.5.1 is the first candidate release for a fix. It needs just a bit more weight added to it though before they’ll commit to the fix, so if you find this bug important please open a PMR ticket and ask to have SPR # DCOE6N82TP fixed.

The Short Story:

Documents can – on rare occasion – remain in a view even though they should no longer be there according to the view’s selection formula.

This problem affects any Domino database with the database property “optimize document table map” enabled. Which happens to be many core Domino databases, including the NAB.

Refreshing an affected view (e.g. F9 in the client) does NOT fix the problem.

Rebuilding the view index via one of the following methods will fix the problem, temporarily:

  1. Shift-F9 in the client

  2. A Fixup followed by Updall -R on the affected database

  3. Ctrl-Shift-F9 in the client

Once fixed, the problem may never manifest in that DB again. Or it may re-manifest in the same view (or a different view) in 5 minutes. It’s very intermittent.

The problem is also extremely rare – we do massive amounts of doc updates daily and are only seeing this problem manifest a couple of times a week. It happens without warning – potentially after years of trouble-free view indexes.

Turning off the database property (followed by a compact) will avoid the problem, but at a massive performance penalty (see below).

Why should you care?

  1. This is a cornerstone of Domino workflow functionality:

  • doc appears in a view

  • doc’s fields get changed

  • doc should no longer appear in view <<< with this bug, this step is not 100% reliable

  1. This property is enabled by default on many core Domino database (including the NAB). Due to the extreme rarity and intermittence of the bug, it is possible that a wide variety of all-around “strange” behavior is related to this obscure problem.

  2. If you have any custom apps on Domino, this bug can obviously cause severe problems.

  3. Since fixing this bug will require an ODS update, it must get fixed in a major release. This bug has taken literally years to track down so if a plan isn’t made to address it in early 8.5, it will need to wait until N/D 9 or later.

“I’ve seen this property but I don’t know what it does exactly…”

From the Help:

That’s a bit vague, though. Here’s an example that might make things more clear. Picture a database with 100,000 docs:

99,500 form field of “A”

 500 form field of "B"

With “Optimize Document Table Map” OFF, A view or NotesDatabase.Search() with a formula of SELECT FORM=“B” will iterate through ALL 100,000 docs looking for matches.

WIth “Optimize Document Table Map” ON, A view or NotesDatabase.Search() with a formula of SELECT FORM=“B” will iterate through ONLY the 500 “B” docs looking for matches. The other 99,500 docs are skipped.

This can result in HUGE performance improvements for large DBs with small subsets of documents. This property worked brilliantly in R5, but has been glitchy since ND 6.0.

Thanks for reading. Without this bug being fixed, we all have two options:

  1. Accept “mostly accurate” view indexes throughout many DBs in Domino (including the NAB, which will cause general strangeness on occasion).

  2. Avoid using one of the most performance-enhancing options of Domino.

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Subject: Response

Erik,

There is internal discussion to determine the proper course of action for this SPR. Please note that this is a very rare issue that appears to be limited to documents whose form has changed. We do not currently believe that this behavior would be seen in databases that do not have this type of workflow, with the NAB being an important example.

For now, the recommendation is to disable the “Optimize document table map” flag for any database that tracks a note’s form changes for workflow.

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Subject: Re: Response

Thanks for the response, Chad. We are definitely aware of the rarity of the problem – for us, we’ve chosen to deal with the problems rather than disable the db property. The impact of the performance hit is simply too great and would result in massive scalability problems.

The major concern with this problem is, in fact, its rarity: it is nearly impossible to reproduce on-demand. With such rarity I would venture that it’s very likely there are others experiencing this problem that don’t even know it, and probably other PMRs opened in the past that are influenced by this problem.

Our PMR was finally listed as “closed, no plans to fix without additional weight”. If that’s not the case then we were given misinformation, and it’s possible I may have jumped the gun with my post. But going off of the knowledge available hopefully you’ll understand our attempt to add more weight to the SPR.

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Subject: Chad, I’m not sure your explanation makes any sense

The NAB basis almost every index on a TYPE field instead of the FORM field. So it would never take advantage of the “optimized table bitmap” (the single dumbest name for a switch in all of Domino, by the way) in the first place. In other words, the directory already places itself outside the scope of this performance tuning feature.

I think this is an excellent question for my blog. Let’s see if this is common practice.

http://www.lotus911.com/nathan/escape.nsf/d6plinks/NTFN-7FVUHN

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Subject: Clarification

I’m not sure if I was clear in the prior response. The NAB is an example of an application that does not have the type of workflow that causes the problem documented in the SPR.

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Subject: Chad, check out my update please

It affects your Resource Reservation template. You know the one that probably has 1000 outstanding SPRs. :slight_smile: (I exaggerate, of course, but I know it’s a lot because the R&R is a famously buggy part of Domino.)