I have a couple of users who are remote and make local mail replicas. Recently they experienced massive growth of their local mail replica. The mail file size on the server is about 500 MB and the size of the local mail replica is limited only by the free space on their laptop (30 GB). I have tried to have them delete the local replica and make a new one with the same results. I also have tried reinstalling Notes on their laptops, but no success.
Has anyone else seen this or have any recommendations for me? Would it be helpful to give a new file name or folder to the local replica? I am trying to reproduce the problem here in the office but am unable to do so.
Subject: RE: local mail replicas grow out of control
no luck yet. We have potentially isolated it to our SonicWall 3060 firewall and running domino on an iSeries. The packet size seems to not work very well. We are in the middle of moving off the iSeries to a windows platform and migrating to Domino 8 to work around it. Changing our Sonicwall 3060 will be a last resort.
We recently had again a similar problem with server replica’s, where replica’s of a database were growing out of control. What you should check is the replication log and probably you will find errors there. In my experience the following can happen:
Replication starts replication a document (can be a big document or even a smaller one) and for some reason (corruption on the document or network configuration setting) the replication of the doc does not finish and replication is aborted. The receiving database will then have allocated storage for the part of the doc it received but the doc is not ready. The storage space is allocated but not released when the replication fails.
If this happens one time then there is not much of an issue but if the error that causes the replication to abort is repeating then every replication will again abort and allocate space for an unfinished document and there you have the growth of your database.
A copy stile compact will bring the replica back to its normal proportions, but again if the error is not removed the growth will start again. So to fix this you need to find out what causes the replication to fail. We have seen this happen with corrupted docs but also with very large docs and session time out settings on passthru servers that disconnected the session while the large doc was being transferred.
I’m not sure if this is an issue that is fixed in later releases but the recent occurrence in our environment was on 6.5.4
Subject: resolved local mail replicas grow out of control
Thank you very much for your response. That is good information. In our case the problem has been resolved by moving to a windows platform for the server and upgrading to 8.0.1. We have had this in place for several weeks and have not seen the problem reoccur.