Lotus Notes 8.5.2 not stable enough

HCL Domino Domino Forum
1

Hello everyone

I think that the 8.5.2 release isn’t stable enough and contains certain software defects. I used to use version 8.5.1 with FP4 and it was quite stable. Last week I did a fresh new install of Lotus Notes 8.5.2 and started to encounter errors which I never experienced before. One of them being when accessing a folder. An error message would keep being displayed, “Cannot find external name: NAMESORTVIEWPO”. Upgrading the design using the latest template would clear this problem but a day later would re-appear again.

I’ve also encountered intermittent application crashes i.e. when starting up Lotus Notes in the morning.

Has anyone encountered such issues? Furthermore I will be postponing our Lotus Domino upgrade to ver 8.5.2 because there might be certain issues which I might not be aware of. Our current Domino 8.5.1 installation is quite stable.

Pierre

2

Subject: agreed

This is definitely quite a buggy update

Start-up speed is very slow (and I have the option checked to start up services on system start). I’ve seen the bar move across then go backwards on numerous occasions.

Also seeing a lot more delays in refreshing views/opening databases etc.

Not getting a lot of crashes though, just various oddities like focus issues in designer, and even switching clients on its own (from Notes to Designer/Admin when opening db/view)

3

Subject: Totally Agree…

I’m with Dan…I’m seeing a lot of the same issues. In addition to those items mentioned, I’m also experiencing problems with our cluster. It’s not updating all the databases…mail file on my home server and web server were 5 hours off until I forced replication.

It also took me two reboots this morning to get the client to start, the designer continues to try to connect to every server I apparently have listed in my bookmarks, even if those servers are no longer in existence.

On the bright side, I’m not getting any crashes but I’d have to agree it’s not a very stable upgrade.

4

Subject: You should really do the measurements

because I am personally seeing a 100% increase in start time (both warm and cold) and an average of 50% improvement on typical OS and hardware. You results don’t seem typical to what I am seeing at clients so far.

5

Subject: Status bar ‘loop’, client will not launch?

Dan, you mention that “I’ve seen the bar move across then go backwards on numerous occasions”. Do you mean the status bar hit 100% complete (far right), the client doesn’t launch then the status bar returns again to building from the left - all the while the client will never launch? I see that issue but only if the client is very very very quickly restarted after closing Notes Standard 8.5.2. This is not normal end-user behavior. I only ran into this because I was timing the startup improvements with NNTSPRELD in place over and over again. I can make this happen on 3 different systems. I’ve PMR’d it to make sure it’s not representative of another deeper problem. So far IBM can’t reproduce so maybe it’s our environment, dunno yet. Users would normally not do this so hopefully the issue is only on very quick restarts (you end up seeing two notes.exe’s and two nlnotes.exe processes in ProcMon data, but notes2.exe terminates in a second or two in this scenario.

6

Subject: Exactly the same problem

No solution ?

7

Subject: yes and no

One user with the loop-at-launch issue that could never launch Notes after being upgraded from 802FP4 to 852 - had provisioning errors during install - messy registry that takes a uninstall/clean registry/reinstall to resolve. Another issue of a looping standard client - seems that the loop after a very quick restart might have been due to the 8.5.2 client with embedded Sametime not being allowed to connect to the Sametime server. Since that fix has been in place, can’t reproduce the issue.

8

Subject: workaround for looping startup bar

One item we found to work is to wipe out the ini leaving the first 6 or 7 lines and then doing a reconfig. This gets the client launched and you can troubleshoot further if necessary.

9

Subject: Our internal testing has shown improvements in startup times.

If you are seeing problems in your environment, please raise a PMR so that they can be investigated and addressed.

What startup times are you seeing prior to 8.5.2 and now in 8.5.2?

NOTE: This 1st startup after an install and/or upgrade does do extra processing and is not representative of a typical start.

Doug Conmy

Notes Client Lead Architect

10

Subject: PMR

Am thinking about sending a couple of PMRs, the startup times are just gut feeling really, haven’t timed anything - and I definitely didn’t see the progress bar go backwards in 8.5.1 but I do in 8.5.2.

I’m also thinking - if the processes are set to load on system startup but the first thing you do is open the Notes client would that then cause problems? If the background processes are still starting when you try and launch Notes would there be a problem?

This isn’t an initial install, I installed it on the day of release so had it for a while now.

11

Subject: mail bug in 8.5.2

I upgraded one of my desktop clients to 8.5.2 (with designer and admin client) and the only way I can reply to an email is to actually open the email. I’m using the selection column, side preview, and when I highlight a document and try to reply it says there is no document selected. I’ve tried clicking in the selection column and get the same result. I just recommended upgrading to 8.5.1 to a client and will leave 8.5.2 alone until some of these issues are resolved.

12

Subject: probably multiple documents were selected

hi, Ann - you probably had multiple documents selected, and the Reply action did not know which one to act upon. The message is misleading.

anne

13

Subject: Yes - 8.5.2 on Terminal Server seems unstable

We have several problems, but one we just figured out last night, when no one was on but 2 adm’s was that Lotus Notes Client 8.5.2 will not let 2 Adms in at the same time (the 2nd one loops on longing in). This was a problem on a previous release and seems to be back. We tried the ini variable DEBUG_GLOBAL_NAMESPACE_DISABLE=1 but that did not work. We were able to reproduce, and when we pulled the Administrators group from one of the Adm on Windows 2008 TS, that solved that problem (but that will not work long term). But we are having others. Users cannot save preferences (they don’t take - revert the next day) and Sametime wants to create a community for each user. Seems that users are working in the same directory even though we have the Data Directory and INI mapped to their U:\Notes directory. ??

See further posts on how it was resolved

14

Subject: Resolved today - we will see . . .

We have a stable? environment by making some changes. We installed on Terminal server as many installation examples with Citrix. But the key was

C:\Program Files (x86)\IBM\Lotus\Notes\framework\rcp\rcplauncher.properties

Remove lines

config.system.2=${rcp.home}/rcp/systemdata

config.system.1=-data

Change Line below to your user workspace

rcp.data=U:/Notes/workspace

C:\Program Files (x86)\IBM\Lotus\Notes\framework\rcp\deploy\jvm.properties

Change vmarg.Xmx=-Xmx256m → vmarg.Xmx=-Xmx1024m

vmarg.Xms=-Xms48m → vmarg.Xms=-Xmx128m

Remove “SingleJVM,” from vmarg.Dshare=-Xshareclasses:name=xpdplat_.jvm,

controlDir=${prop.jvm.shareclasses.loc},groupAccess,keep,singleJVM,nonfatal

We had notes ini only in user data directory.

This worked great except we use Notes FX and it wants to find an ini in the Notes executable directory. So we put a notes ini also in the Notes executable (C:\ibm\Lotus\Notes) but this causes some problems.

We are wondering if you can use FX in a Multiuser env correctly, and have seperate ini files for each user.

If you have a NOtes ini file in c:\ibm\Lotus Notes, even if you map the short cust to the users directory =u:\notes\notes.ini, I think it grabs the ini from d:\ibm\lotus\notes.

So if you don’t use FX, which most people don’t, do not put an ini in the executable directory.

15

Subject: I Agree with you

I tried out the Mac 8.5.2 client and it was terrible, I ended up going back to 8.5.1 FP4. I would get random crashes doing normal things like right clicking on a folder. I posted the issue and someone asked for the NSD files etc. But frankly I don’t have enough time to help IBM troubleshoot their issues, they should be able to release a quality product.

16

Subject: Email template odd behavior with date sort

Has anyone encountered an issue after applying the 8.5.2 mail template where the person sorts by date and only a couple documents appear? New messages appear that arrive after the template is applied, but previous docs do not unless opened and resaved. Only happens to inbox when sorted by date. Curious to see if anyone else has seen this. Thanks!

17

Subject: Yes I have encountered the problem

It was on a database that was replicated on a cluser. The problem was only on one server so I recreated the database from the cluster replica on it was OK

18

Subject: re Lotus Notes 8.5.2 not stable enough

Hi Dan

Seeing also issues you mentioned. I never expected this to happen with such a much anticipated new release. Makes you wonder why there was such a delay in releasing this version!

Pierre

19

Subject: So far so good for us.

We have 5 servers running 8.5.2 (Windows), mostly 64 bit. One server is BES 4.1.7 with 32 bit 8.5.2 and over 100 users. Going well since first day of release.

About 10 Notes clients are on 8.5.2 and that is going well too. Haven’t tested clustering yet

20

Subject: Have Not Got Any Issues So Far

Hi,I have upgraded my Notes client from 8.5.1-FP2 to 8.5.2 & it’s running fine.

Don’t find any such issues, but the start up time is not much feeling to be improved.