Several of our staff have noticed performance issues on their Notes 6.5.5 clients. The Domino server (6.5.5) is of the following spec:
HP DL380 G4
2 * P4 2.8 ghz
4GB DDR2 RAM
6 * 150 GB HD’s configured as RAID 5
2 * GB Ethernet adapters teamed.
On inspecting the Domino server I found that the Memory used was around 50% (2 GB). Despite 50% of memory being unused, the Page File is used constantly and averages a size of around 2.5GB. I don’t understand why the Page file is being used when there is still so much physical memory available.
I monitored the Physical Disk activity and found that the disks are averaging 90% usages and would often hit 100% for long periods of time. I presume this is because of the constant Page File access causing a bottleneck therefore affecting client access.
I’ve looked at other servers, including my file server and the disk activity averages around 30% which I believe to be normal and the page file usage is around 300MB
Subject: Memory Issue - High virtual Mem, low Physical Mem, disk thrashing
Thanks for the resonse guys,
Can anyone tell me what is making the page file so large? On other servers the page file is a few hundred MB, on my Domino Servers the page file is arond 2.5 GB.
It was mentioned that the maxium “process” memory allocation is 2GB. Is that process or service??? the reason i ask is becuase no individual processes are running over 1GB on my servers however i do have about 6 processes running at 1GB.
Subject: Memory Issue - High virtual Mem, low Physical Mem, disk thrashing
Andrew,
A domino server will only use about 2-2.5 gb of RAM. The rest will always be unused. It’s just a limitation of the architecture. If you’re bumping up against that ceiling, say because of a large number of concurrent users, then you need to think about partitioning your server to make better use of your hardware.
Subject: Memory Issue - High virtual Mem, low Physical Mem, disk thrashing
This is actually a limitation of the Windows 32bit architecture. It will only allocate a maximum of 2 GB per process. There are many posts in this forum on this subject. Also, some excellent redbooks (http://redbooks.ibm.com) on domino performance.
One common recommendation for your situation is to have a dedicated hard drive for your page file. Then paging will have minimal effect on the domino server. Hard to say more with out knowing the specifics of your environment.