Client and Designer are simply too unreliable.
If I have one word to describe this release it would be slow.
When is IBM going to improve on this release.
If I knew then what I know now I would not have upgraded to the eclipse version.
This product is very disappointing.
Subject: re: Notes 8.5.1 (eclipse) - (speed)
I’ve found 8.5.1 to be magnitudes better than 8.5 base. Running 8.5.2 FP2 is pretty good, speed and bugwise on the client (there are still a few glitches, but it is decently usable).
Running 8.5.1 FP1 designer, I’m not so happy yet. It’s hard to get used to (I’ll get over that eventually) and it seems to have “issues”.
Subject: Unresponsive…
Trying to open a users mail file in administrator and had the hour glass for 10 minutes. finally forced a shutdown because the database did not open.
I have been working with Lotus Notes for almost 12 years and this has to be the most unresponsive client, designer and administrator I have experencied.
I am also running a machine with 7.03 client, administrator and designer. While the 8.5.1 administrator is attempting to open the database, I can use the 7.03 administrator on the other machine and open the database in less than a minute. 8.5.1 has been trying to open for almost 10 minutes.
second time today.
I guess I will have to do a complete uninstall, reinstall and hope for the best!
Subject: It might help a little
I’ve been thru the uninstall & reinstall - it seemed to help a little.
Adding an additional 2 gigs of ram helped, too. But I shouldn’t have to when I already had 2 gigs.
At least 8.5.1 doesn’t crash as often as 8.0 did.
Overall, I agree 100% - I find it next to impossible to continue to use the eclipse designer, and have contemplated going back to 6.5.5 for daily use.
Subject: More RAM - Happier Clients
This may seem self-evident but it bears considering, I believe. From my experiences, the entire R8.x client sets have been much more susceptible to hardware resource limitations than previous versions. A big part of this is the memory available to the JVM. The more physical RAM you have in a machine, the better the experience; and taken a step further, the more memory that you allow JVM to use, the experience becomes even better!
Here is a link to a nice discussion on some JVM tweaks to help that part work better:
http://www.thenorth.com/apblog4.nsf/0/BB5DDB03611B2BB1852574D7005FF852
Be sure to read down through the comments as there are a number of other suggestions that folks have added.
Yes, the new clients can be painfully slow (although I haven’t experienced the delays you have seen) I have also seen the experience sped up through moving to R8.5.1 and implementing the JVM tweaks.
Good luck!
Subject: William says - more RAM != more JVM memory, in summary…
How much RAM your machine has is only marginally relevant. If you have 2 GBytes but DDE’s JVM is only using 256 MBytes of that, then adding memory to the machine doesn’t really help DDE that much. True, it is using binary executables but it seems most of the heavy lifting in DDE is done with Java. The indicated link (while I haven’t read it) should tell you how to fiddle with the JVM parameters for DDE.
A word of caution that I haven’t seen mentioned on any blog/site concerning DDE adjustments: all my research (for another project) indicates Java does not like more than 1024 MBytes of memory, and could even become unstable with more than that amount. If someone at Lotus could refute that I’m sure people would be happy know what the upper limit might be.
Right now I have it set at 640 MBytes (from the default of a paltry 256), and while it doesn’t seem to make it any faster, it does seem to make R8.5.1FP1 one heck of a lot less flakey. (knocks on head) I also have my “min” memory parameter set to 256 MBytes.
Here is some info on Websphere, which seems relevant to DDE as well:
Hope this helps…
Subject: There is a Practical Limit to JVM Memory
I agree, that there is a practical limit to the amount of memory that you want to assign JVM. My experience is purely anecdotal, but what I ran across on a box with 4GB of physical RAM was that giving JVM more than 1GB of RAM to work with made it slower or non-functional.
Subject: Re: More RAM - Happier Clients
I feel the original poster’s pain.
I have 12 GB RAM on this box and no matter what, DDE is a hog and unresponsive.
I can double click - it used to be just click - on Forms or Agents and sometimes I can get a list of forms or agents and sometimes I just get the hour glass - or the spinning circle in W7.
Please, give us the option to choose the classic Designer. DDE is simply not ready for prime time development.